Continue reading »]]> By his second week in the village with the unpronounceable name, Dale had taken up with the old men fishing out beyond the rocks. The place was called the Blue Pool and people died there, he was told, freak waves being known to carry them away. Fierce tragic, as his new friends had it.

‘Saw a man plucked from the earth here once,’ Gerry McGovern said. ‘Looked off at a girl in a summer dress and then, well—’

‘Gone?’ asked Dale.

‘Gone.’

‘Christ.’

McGovern blessed himself.

Beside him, Bartley tapped his pipe upside-down against his hand. ‘Every one of your stories starts like that, Gerry. Every one.’

McGovern sneered. ‘Won’t be long now,’ he said to the American.

‘Hopefully,’ said Dale, who had been waiting ten days for the parish priest. ‘I should have called ahead, but… I wasn’t sure.’

‘Bad luck, surely,’ Bartley said. He cut thin strips of tobacco from a block with his penknife and rolled the tar curls between filthy palms until the nest was finely shredded. ‘Though you could hardly blame the Father,’ he said. ‘Tis the first holiday that man has taken since God-knows-when.’

‘Well his timing’s incredible,’ Dale said, ‘just incredible’. He followed the thread of his borrowed line down into the water and watched a tiny ripple stir around it. It was a fine morning on the coast of Ireland, cool beneath a naked sun. Dale felt like he’d been sitting there since he first trundled through the airport, catching nothing and talking about airplanes or weather. Every day he ate his breakfast in the B&B and every night he drank at a small bar in the centre of the village. He had yet to go into the grey stone hills which loomed above the crooked, multicoloured houses. There was just something about them, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

‘I wonder,’ Bartley said, ‘D’you think they’d ever have one of our lads up there?’ He plucked a pebble from the ground and placed it in the bowl of his pipe. ‘They’re fierce small, you know, because of our planes. They’d fit them tin cans of yours awful easy.’

Dale laughed. ‘Height really isn’t . . . ’ He looked around. ‘It doesn’t matter. The program’s shut down.’

‘Aye,’ Bartley said, serious all of a sudden. ‘Because of the crash?’

‘It wasn’t a crash.’

‘The accident then?’ He held a match towards his face and cupped both hands above the pipe.

‘Yeah,’ Dale said. ‘Because of the accident.’ He drank from the plastic bottle beside him and stared out across the water. As we set sail on this new ocean, he thought…

‘Terrible thing,’ Bartley was saying. ‘Terrible altogether. Did you know any of them boys, you did?’

‘I knew them all,’ Dale said. ‘Davis, O’Neil, Rodriguez . . . ’ He took a deep breath and looked up at the sky. It was two years later and the president’s speech still rang in his ears: ‘Aquarius is lost. There are no survivors.’

#

Ireland. The slide-rule rigidity of Houston had not prepared him for it. Dale was used to clean lines and order, but this little village was a bow-tie of crooked streets knotted where their paths crisscrossed with those of history and want. The first time Dale saw it he had thought it was a theme park. Even after fourteen days on the ground, its true arrangement continued to elude him. One wrong turn, what he thought might make a sensible shortcut, and Dale would find himself on the shoulder of the potted two-lane to another parish, would suddenly be in the company of dirty hens by a half-finished house on the edge of the arid countryside.

He had taken a room in the centre of the village, on what passed for the main drag. It was a rambling nook-and-cranny job, an anarchic spider-web of low doors and high ceilings rebuilt and renovated many times. Thomas and Catherine, the elderly couple who owned it, had gleefully explained the building’s history to him; how it had consumed outhouse after outhouse, how it had gone from farmhouse to townhouse, from boarding house to B&B, and Dale was sure his room had once been among the rafters of a forge or stable. Standing in the guesthouse doorway, one could go only left or right— to the pub or the sea— and still Dale always managed to get lost.

‘The streets all move around at night,’ Catherine told him one morning.

‘Nice try,’ Dale said.

‘It’s true,’ Thomas added, cocking his head towards the window. ‘The village used be up there, in the hills.’

Dale looked over his shoulder. It was as much limestone as he had ever seen. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said at last.

‘Oh yeah,’ Thomas winked at his wife. ‘Twas a deal made with the devil, you know? Sealed with a hoof. And pretty soon the whole lot of us are to be sucked right down the Blue Pool, like one of them black spots of yers.’

Dale thought for a moment. ‘A black hole?’

‘Aye, a black hole.’

The American laughed. At least the food was always good. ‘I appreciate the effort,’ he said, ‘but I’m not buying it.’

‘Then tell me this so,’ Thomas hunched over his plate, ‘did ye really go up there? To the Moon, like?’

‘Thomas,’ Dale said, ‘I’ll let you know.’ He excused himself as he always did, climbing the bare staircase back to his room where a copy of the county paper lay yellowing in the sun. “Spaceman Dale” had made page five, and he had cringed when he saw it, his life unspooled as lies and inexplicable exaggeration, the gross embellishment of an undistinguished record. To read it one would think him a Borman or a Conrad, if not the equal of Armstrong himself. Dale had not looked at it since Thomas first produced it one morning over breakfast.

‘I didn’t know you gave an interview’ the old man had teased at the time.

‘I didn’t,’ Dale had said, staring at the picture they had printed alongside the article, a publicity snap of him at the initial rollout of Aquarius, his arm around Rodriguez’s shoulder and both men grinning. He supposed it was easily sourced.

‘Twas a slow week,’ Thomas said.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Slow enough now,’ the old man went on. ‘Though Maggie Kelleher’s ewe drowned down by the shore last evening. That’s two now.’

‘I’m sorry, what?’

‘Two,’ he said. ‘Careless, that woman. Not like her husband, God bless him.’

‘God bless him,’ repeated Catherine, drifting through the room with a plate piled high with toasty strips of bacon.

Dale had watched this all with amusement. After breakfast he had asked Thomas for the paper though he didn’t know why. Vanity, probably, though when he went back to his room he refused to open it again, merely threw it on the dresser beside the tin flask he had brought across the ocean. It irked him, the usurpation of his life. He had never even met this reporter and yet her fanciful invention now defined him to everyone he met.

Catherine told him not to worry. Every morning after breakfast she would meet him at the bottom of the stairs, he with a satchel to see him through his fishing; she with a little foil package of sandwiches, moist, crustless feasts of dark bread and thick-cut meats painted heavily in relish. It was a peculiar, motherly gesture with which she earned Dale’s gratitude forever.

‘Sure, we have to keep you fed,’ she said.

Somewhere Thomas coughed violently. Dale smiled, and let himself out.

Down by the Blue Pool, the American explained his theory about his room having once been a forge, but McGovern only smirked.

‘What?’

‘Ah now,’ McGovern said, turning to Bartley.

Puffing his pipe, his cheeks an artful bellows, Bartley shook his head. ‘Didn’t they tell you, Dale?’ he asked. ‘Sure everybody knows, that part of Tom’s used be the undertakers.’

#

For years he had heard Rodriguez talk of coming here, of green hills and red-headed girls. It was a fantasy, colourful and wild, and by definition it bore scant resemblance to what met Dale as he rolled his battered hardside off the plane. Not a fertile field or a dancing lass in sight, instead a murky tonnage of dull cloud which weighted on the whole country like a fat palm pressed upon a chest. At customs, a sneering, grey-haired policeman stamped his passport without a word. At the car hire desk, a woman with food stains on her blouse went on and on about the foulness of the weather, about the worst summer in a generation and how the crops were rotting in the ground.

‘Twas far from the ground the likes of her were raised,’ Bartley said when Dale recounted him the story. Hell of an introduction, the American thought later. It was the first time they had met, the old man seemingly oblivious to the fact that it had indeed been raining steadily since Dale’s arrival, weather which had confined them all inside the gloomy local.

‘It was late,’ Dale said. ‘I’m sure she was just tired.’

‘No excuse for that kind of behaviour, and you a guest of this great little nation.’ Bartley daubed at the beige moustache left by his pint and leaned into his new acquaintance. ‘What was it you said you did again?’

Dale cleared his throat. ‘Aeronautics,’ he said warily.

‘No,’ Bartley said, squinting. ‘No, that’s not it… Too much bearing, too… clean cut.’ A ripple of laughter passed through the bar.

‘I’m sorry?’ Dale said. He hadn’t realised anyone was listening.

‘Not that you should have to be,’ the old man said, ‘but I appreciate it.’

Dale looked around, though no one met his eyes. He turned back to Bartley. ‘And what’s your line?’

‘When you’re ready, Pat,’ Bartley said, grinning at the barman and sinking a bony finger deep into his empty glass.

‘You’ll not get an answer out of him,’ the barman told Dale.

‘Yeah, I’m starting to see that.’

Beside him, Bartley cleared his throat. ‘So,’ he said, ‘is it a pilot or an engineer you are?’ he asked.

‘First one,’ Dale said, ‘and then the other.’ He was getting the hang of Bartley.

‘Test pilot?’ the old man said, narrowing his eyes. He was sharp.

Dale shook his head, sipped his drink and allowed himself a tiny smile.

‘He’s toying with me,’ Bartley announced.

The barman said nothing.

‘You really want to know?’ Dale asked at last.

‘I do,’ Bartley said.

‘He does,’ the barman echoed, elbows on the counter.

Dale sighed. ‘Alright.’ He tapped the little silver pin on his lapel. ‘Astronaut Corps.,’ he said.

‘Well now,’ Bartley said.

The barman whistled quietly.

Dale sipped his drink. ‘It’s a job like any other.’

‘A job like any other, he says.’ Bartley cocked his thumb in Dale’s direction. ‘Bring him another whiskey, will you, Pat?’

The American shifted his weight on the barstool. ‘Hospitality?’

‘Generosity of spirit,’ Bartley said, a gleam in his eye. He began on the fresh pint before him with a kind of practiced reverence.

‘Well then,’ Dale said, raising his own glass, ‘I believe I’m supposed to say sláinte.’

‘Aye,’ said Bartley, ‘you’ve got it, sláinte indeed’ and so their conversation drifted into trivialities, the price of stout and the state of county games, things which were the heartbeat of the local. Dale left when the bar was almost empty and the barman started to look restless. He had no better grasp on who Bartley was, the old man foxing him at every turn. He walked back to the B&B beneath a loaned umbrella, shaking the rain off out on the step.

‘Gallivanting, was it?’ Thomas asked, stirring from the shadows in the hallway.

‘Only as far as the bar’.

‘How’d you find it?’

‘Your directions were perfect.’

The old man smiled patiently. His teeth were crooked and yellow. ‘I mean,’ he said softly, ‘how was it?’

‘Ah… It was good. I enjoyed it. Met a man named Bartley, I’m sure you know him.’

‘Oh, Bartley’s a cute one alright. Wiley, like.’

Dale rubbed the side of his head. ‘I gathered that.’

‘Fierce interested in you now, I’d say.’

‘He was. Though less forthcoming about himself. I wonder, what is it he does exactly?’

‘His brother killed three Tans in that business with the British.’

‘Right. But Bartley?’

Thomas laughed as he began up the stairs, slapping Dale on the back. ‘Sure, isn’t he his brother’s keeper, Dale? His brother’s keeper.’

#

When the downpours finally ended the little village came into its own. Stone walls caught the new light and turned it back upon the darkest corners of the place. The streets began to glow, and, on their outskirts, brave flowers sprung from a frugal soil. Everywhere became warm and the sky assumed a welcome, almost Texan hue.

‘This is our summer now,’ Bartley announced in the bar that afternoon, wiping his hands on his thighs and standing up. His crooked frame drew nods of approval from the other patrons. It seemed an event of some importance.

‘You going somewhere?’ Dale asked. The half-full glass in front of Bartley was conspicuous.

‘The Blue Pool,’ the old man said, ‘Come on, if you like and we’ll stand you the line.’

That was how it started.

‘You seem awful content,’ Bartley said at the end of that first week’s fishing.

‘Must be the company.’

‘All the same,’ McGovern said, cocking his head towards the grey hills, ‘would you not see The Burren?’

‘I’ve no interest.’

‘Tis a place of beauty.’

‘So I’ve heard.’

‘You’re a strange man, Dale.’

‘I’ve been called worse.’

Their lines hung heavy in the water. Nothing was biting.

‘I heard once,’ Bartley said, ‘that spaceships were tiled, and that ‘twas Irish students working over there that glued them on.’

Dale smiled. ‘Sure, on the outside. Ceramics to survive re-entry, but I don’t know who glued them on.’

‘Pity,’ Bartley said. ‘Pity now.’

Beside him, McGovern shrugged.

‘Twould be nice,’ Bartley went on, ‘to think of the contribution, like.’

‘Twould a’course,’ said McGovern.

Dale looked at the two of them, this grizzled pair, then shook his head and smiled. He closed his eyes and raised his head towards the sun. So unremarkable, he thought, and still so great. Turning away, he opened his eyes and caught the ghost-face of the Moon in daylight peeking through the afternoon. He allowed himself a look of happiness.

‘What’s that now?’ Bartley asked. He never took his eyes off his line.

‘I remember he was on the radio,’ Dale said. ‘Loud and clear. His first words out of the lander were Man, that’s beautiful.’

‘Who was that, then?’

‘A friend of mine,’ Dale said. ‘Rodriguez. One of the men who died.’

Bartley nodded.

Beside him, McGovern asked what it was like. He too was looking at the Moon now, the withered veins on his unshaven neck coaxed back to elasticity by the tilt of his blunt chin.

‘Rock,’ said Dale. ‘He went on and on about the rock, the mountains and the boulders and the dust.’

‘Rock?’ McGovern said. ‘Mountains and dust?’

‘Sure you could see that here,’ said Bartley.

Dale grinned. ‘Could you see the colours in the grey? The red and orange and the yellow tints from the sun?’ He laughed. ‘God, he wouldn’t shut up about that. We could hardly get him to carry out his orders.’

The two old Irishmen exchanged a look. Dale couldn’t read it.

‘You’d get the most of it here anyway,’ Bartley said. ‘The sun on the stone and all that. No knowing what you’d see.’

‘Sure isn’t it all they go on about above in them hills?’ McGovern added. ‘And they don’t need any of them helmets or big white suits to see it in.’

‘They’re lucky,’ Dale said.

‘Terrible lucky,’ Bartley nodded.

Dale smiled. ‘But can they see the Earth rising over the horizon the way the moon does here? That’s what Rodriguez saw. He said he was standing there, looking up at planet Earth, this great, blue oasis in the black velvet sky, and he said it was just too beautiful to have happened by accident…’

They were listening to him now, he saw, Bartley and McGovern with their grey heads cocked, though Dale didn’t know what else to tell them. Technical particulars and numbers and dry facts would only spoil it, and Rodriguez only shared so much that anyone would call poetic.

Instead, Dale reeled in his line and watched ripples echo all across the surface as his bait broke through from underneath. Earth, he mused, was covered mostly of water. A blue pool in the night of space. Its name was suddenly inadequate, powerless to convey its sheer, inexplicable abundance. Staring into the water, he found himself speaking without realizing.

‘Rodriguez was talking to us afterwards,’ he said, ‘when he was back aboard Aquarius, and he told me he’d seen the whole world, all of it, all at once. Imagine that, every human being in existence, everything we are, all of it a size that if he reached out he could have plucked it from the sky. I’ll never forget that,’ he said. ‘It was almost as good as being there.’

‘Almost?’

‘Almost.’ Dale laughed again. He wasn’t sure which one of them had said it, but it didn’t matter. ‘We’re explorers,’ he said. ‘Or at least we were; we should be. And no explorer ever knows exactly what he’s going to find when he gets to where he’s going, but every time we fly we add to what’s known. Rodriguez, he helped me to learn something, you understand? About the grand scheme of things. Perspective, that’s what I learned from him.’

‘Aye,’ McGovern said, licking his lips, ‘but what have you learned from us, I wonder?’

‘I’ve learnt,’ Dale said slowly, ‘that there aren’t any fish in this pond, are there?’ He looked from McGovern to Bartley and back again, but the two old men had already started laughing.

#

Blue skies and bright light. It was outdoors that Dale felt most at home in. All Irish people seemed to regard the world through doors and windows, he had noticed. Their view was blinkered, like the draw-horses in the etchings which hung on the walls of Catherine’s dining room. When people here spoke of the land they did not mean the country or the state, they meant the field, some small enclosure within which they were snared by circumstance or greed. Whole lives here were bounded by the whitewashed sovereignties of dated bungalows or played out in discontent behind the cobweb-covered lens of guilty window panes.

And yet Dale surprised himself with what he loved about them, their history, their rancour hardening around them into flakes or scales, of all things their certainty in what cannot be seen. For everyone he had met here, a palm’s rough lines were no less truthful than the dotted contours of a map. Myth and fact were interchangeable, reality a personal affliction.

‘What was it like,’ he asked McGovern, ‘growing up around here?’

They sat with Bartley by the Blue Pool, the sun baking all of them.

‘I suppose it was the same as anywhere,’ the old man said. ‘We chased girls and went to matches and swam in the sea.’

‘Aye,’ said Bartley, ‘going round with your tongue hanging out.’

‘We played hurling,’ McGovern added. ‘Fastest field game in the world.’

Dale squinted at him. ‘Is that a fact?’

‘Oh yeah. But don’t think we didn’t know what it was ye were up to.’

‘Ye…?’

‘Oh, he’s been workin’ on this one,’ Bartley said.

‘Twas before my sister was married,’ McGovern began. ‘And she was still living with us, which is a long time ago now. I’d just started inside at Callaghan’s and I was driving in and out of the city every day.’

Dale turned to Bartley. ‘What’s he talking about?’

‘Your friends,’ the old man said, raising his eyebrows. ‘The men above.’

‘We’d to go to the neighbours,’ McGovern went on. ‘We’d still no TV ourselves.’

Dale smiled. ‘The Moon landings,’ he said, getting it.

‘Momentous!’ McGovern was in full flight now. ‘No thought of course to the risks involved. Just those two lads bouncing ‘round the place, like kangaroos the pair of them. The boys were all trying it at work the next day. I swear, old Roddy Callaghan himself, leppin’ around the yard…’ He looked at Dale.

‘I’m sorry,’ the American said. ‘I don’t know who that is.’

‘Ah,’ McGovern said sadly, ‘sure it doesn’t… Never mind.’

Between them, Bartley was shaking his head. ‘There was no television where I was. Had to see it in the papers next day. Yer lad Aldrin like the Michelin Man, setting up the flag as if he owned the damn place.’ He laughed. ‘I have to hand it to ye, that was a good one.’ He laid a hand on Dale’s arm and nodded. A livery of age adorned his skin. McGovern’s too, and Dale suddenly felt out of place.

‘Why is it,’ the American asked, ‘that everyone’s so old here?’

‘Say what?’

‘I mean,’ Dale said, ‘where are all the young people?’

‘Sure here’s one now,’ McGovern said, elbowing Dale gently in the ribs and indicating the path from the road where a meek spectre with a Methuselan gait tottered in their direction. It was Regan, a venal leprechaun of a man whom Dale had seen around the village.

‘Is it yourself?’ Bartley asked without looking away from the water.

‘It is,’ Regan said, standing above them as if in judgment. ‘And tell me, gentlemen, how’s the fishing?’

‘Could be worse,’ McGovern said beneath his breath. ‘Could be better too.’

Regan glowered at him. He stood crooked, with his weight resting on a walking stick. One eye, Dale saw, was perpetually narrower than the other. ‘We’ve never really had the chance to talk,’ he said to the American, ‘and I’ve been meaning to ask you, what was it like up there?’

Dale clinched his jaw. Someone must have told him. ‘I don’t know,’ he said at last.

Regan leaned closer. ‘Sure, how could you forget a thing like that?’

‘I was an alternate,’ he said. ‘A backup. I’ve never been up there.’

‘Some other lad went?’

‘Yeah, some other lad.’

Regan licked his lips. ‘So you never flew?’

‘I flew combat over Iraq. I flew experimental planes to the edge of space. I earned my wings.’

‘But not . . .   up there?’

‘No.’

‘They told me,’ Regan said slowly, ‘you were an Astronaut.’

‘That’s right.’

‘But then—’

‘The criteria,’ Dale said, ‘is altitude.’ He held Regan’s stare.

‘Ah now,’ McGovern said, ‘would you ever leave the man alone.’

‘I’ll not be told what to do,’ the interloper snapped back.

‘The fish,’ Bartley said quietly, ‘are finally biting.’

Dale ignored him and turned to the newcomer. ‘And you are?’

‘He’s a Peace Commissioner,’ McGovern said, spitting the words. ‘It’s nothing what you think.’

‘The criteria,’ Regan said, ‘is good character’.

‘The criteria is arse-licking,’ McGovern said. ‘And no better man for it.’

‘I take offence to that.’

‘Tis a pity you won’t take it somewhere else.’

Twisted over his line, Bartley cackled quietly and Dale turned his gaze back out to sea. Regan drew himself away from three fishermen, as if to say well then, so be it.

‘I might see you later,’ he declared to no one in particular, and gradually he shuffled off until he disappeared into the middle distance.

McGovern shook his head. ‘Thinks he’s lord and master, that man does.’ He leaned in close to the American, ‘You should fight him.’

‘Fight him?’ It was Bartley, cackling so loud that the pipe nearly left his lips. ‘Tis not a movie, Gerry.’

McGovern folded his arms. ‘Twould still be right.’

‘I’m not here to start fights,’ Dale said.

‘Sure twas that begrudger started it.’ He raised an arm and pointed after Regan.

‘There’s guys like that all over,’ Dale said.

‘The Man on the Moon,’ Bartley said, rocking back and forth, and laughing to himself. He stabbed at the sky with his pipe.

‘Would you ever put that thing away?’ McGovern said.

The old man grinned at him through yellow teeth. ‘Sure, why would I?’ he asked. ‘Don’t I like my poison neat?’

#

Regan was a troublemaker, but there was no denying he was good at it. What he said had stuck in the American’s craw and the rest of the day hadn’t shaken it. To most of these people, Dale realised, he was just the astronaut— the astronaut— and he had gotten used to that even though it wasn’t true. To have had it called out unsettled him because Rodriguez had been the astronaut, a number one aviator with nothing ruffled but his hair. Beside him Dale was only competent, next on the rotation for sure, but not flying at anything like that altitude. Regan had shown him up, and Dale felt sick that it had taken someone like that to bring him back to Earth. He shook his head. Ego was a part of his job, but he had let it run amuck here. Where was his control, the better part of being a pilot?

When he walked back into the village he was angry, angry about Regan, angry about the priest’s continued absence; he was angry at himself by how quickly he had succumbed to his own tacit celebrity. He sat in the bar until it was dark outside and thought of that damn newspaper lying in his room. He resolved to burn it and called for another whiskey.

Regan, when he arrived hours later, quickly smelt his opportunity on the American’s breath. ‘Well now,’ he said, ‘we can finally have that chat.’

‘I’m not really in the mood.’

‘Ah, we’ll have none of that,’ Regan motioned to the bartender for a pint.

Dale sighed deeply. He hunkered over his drink and resigned himself to Regan’s company. Sometimes in flight you go into a spin; nothing to do but throttle down, flatten out your surfaces, turn your rudder the opposite way and hold. He readjusted himself to face the old man.

‘What do you want to know?’ he said.

‘Would you have gone?’

‘Yes sir, I would.’

‘If the other lad hadn’t flown, like?’

Dale drained his glass. ‘If Rodriguez had been pulled, I’d have taken his seat. If the programme had continued, I’d have had a flight of my own.’

‘And you’d have gone—’

‘Wham, bam, straight to the Moon. That’s where I was going. That’s where Rodriguez went.’

‘Jasus,’ Regan said. ‘Tis a quare thing.’ He returned his attention to the pint in front of him. ‘You tell it well though, you tell it well.’

Dale couldn’t figure out if he was being serious or not. He stared at the empty glass in his hand, how it caught the light. ‘Rodriguez,’ he said at last.

Regan looked at him. ‘What’s that now?’

‘Rodriguez was a better pilot than I was. Christ, he flew that bird the whole way down without a pair of wings to carry him.’

‘This was the crash, it was?’

‘Disintegration,’ Dale said. ‘Aquarius didn’t crash, it disintegrated mid-flight.’ Around him, the regulars had grown quiet. No one had gotten this much out of Dale before.

‘I thought they all died when it came apart,’ Regan said gently. ‘Tis what the papers said.’

‘They didn’t die until they hit the water,’ Dale said. ‘Everything else came apart, but the crew module retained integrity until it hit the ocean. Which is more than I can say for those penny-pinchers in Congress, those smooth-talking Washington slicks scurrying to avoid the blame. “Organisational causes,” they called it, “Poor technical decision-making.” and after all the times we tried to warn them. Ah,’ he said, ‘I don’t know.’ He slid his glass back to the bartender who looked quickly at Regan before refilling it.

‘I was the CAPCOM,’ Dale said. ‘You know, in the movies, when they say, Houston, we have a problem? Well I was the guy they’re talking to, I was Houston. They like to have the alternates wear that headset. The thinking is that we’re best trained to understand what’s going on up there.’

‘And what was?’ Regan whispered. ‘Going on up there, I mean?’

‘Rodriguez and the others were alive for two minutes, thirteen seconds,’ Dale said. ‘Thermal protection failure. Loss of RCS. He couldn’t alter his approach, couldn’t tip the capsule those vital few degrees. And all the while they knew exactly what was happening.’

‘What did they say?’

‘All Rodriguez said was uh-oh.’ Dale emptied his glass again. ‘The downlink went dead then and that was it,’ he said.

‘And?’

Dale looked Regan in his hooded eyes. ‘And that was it,’ he said again. ‘Aquarius suffered what they call “failure of vehicle with loss of human life.” I saw it myself, dozens of sources blossoming on the radar. I saw it again later on, laid out on the floor of a hanger at the Cape. Everything reduced to slag. We all understood the risks, but—’

‘But you thought it’d never happen to someone that you knew?’

Dale shook his head. ‘I never knew how I was going to feel when it happened. God,’ he said, ‘when I could think about it clearly, when I could process it, you know, I was relieved.’

‘…’

‘I thought to myself, that could have been me up there.’ His head sunk deep between his shoulders.

‘Ole human beings are strange,’ Regan said.

Down the bar, a heavy, bovine man was listening intently. He nodded.

‘You can’t be expected to be rational,’ Regan went on. ‘Not with the likes of that going on around you.’

But Dale wasn’t paying any attention. ‘Rodriguez walked on the Moon,’ he said. ‘And he was alive the whole way down, I know it.’ He held up his glass to the bartender.

‘Go home,’ was the reply.

‘He’s right,’ Regan said. ‘You’ll pay no respects like this.’

‘Ah,’ said Dale, standing up. He missed Bartley and McGovern, and couldn’t imagine where they might have got to.  He thought of them as crewmates, strapped in beside him in the nose of some heavy-lifting firecracker and bickering about the running of the parish or talking about the weather like it was a new event. He laughed at that to himself all the way to the B&B, his mood darkening then in the vagueness of the empty room.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, he stared at the small black canister which stood upright on the dresser. ‘I bet you’ve got something smart to say,’ he muttered before he fell asleep.

#

Morning. Scraping birdsong and the hot, fierce lantern of a disappointed sun. A dull halo of the night before hung crooked on Dale’s skull when he woke, a liquordog, as Rodriguez would have said. It was not without cause that Dale seldom touched the hard stuff.

With great, unshaven indignity he presented himself for breakfast but by some small mercy it was quiet, his hosts tuned obsessively to the conditions of their guests. They had seen it all before, of course.

‘Fr. O’Grady’s back,’ Thomas said, nose deep in his newspaper.

‘Saw him last evening,’ Catherine said. ‘He’s looking forward to meeting you.’ There were no sandwiches from her this morning. It was as though she knew his days of fishing were at an end. ‘He should be out of mass within the hour,’ she added.

‘Thanks.’

Outside a soft breeze rolled in from the Atlantic. Dale took his time walking through the village, stopping along the way to buy a bottle of water. When he reached the church he stood outside for almost twenty minutes. Clouds limped slowly through the sky and it felt wrong to go in so he walked on, circling around for many hours. Bartley and McGovern were nowhere to be found, not even by the shore.

At dusk, with a gold Moon shining overhead, he returned to the limestone church and stood in the doorway as a young man in black fussed around the altar.

‘Evening, Padre,’ Dale said.

O’Grady started at him as if trying to place the countenance. ‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘You must be the spaceman.’ His eyes had the smallest pupils Dale had ever seen, mere pinpricks, though with a curious, inviting depth. ‘Strange visitor from another planet, eh?’ He waved the American inside. ‘Dale, isn’t it?’ He did not pause for a reply. ‘What can I do for you, Dale?’

‘It’s about Rodriguez,’ Dale said. ‘A friend of mine. He died in an accident.’

‘The, ah, the Aquarius pilot, yes?’

Dale nodded. He put his hands in his pockets. The air felt heavier in here. ‘This . . . ’ he said. ‘Well… This is where his people were from, I guess you’d say.’

O’Grady moved down among the pews. He smelt faintly of the sacristy. ‘Rodriguez,’ he said carefully. ‘Not really many of them this side of the Shannon.’

‘Fitzpatricks,’ said Dale, ‘on his mother’s side. Grandparents came out a long time ago. I don’t know when.’

‘Well, how about that,’ O’Grady said. ‘An Irish astronaut. Now isn’t that something?’

‘He was hardly Irish,’ said Dale.

‘If he could play for the soccer team he was Irish,’ the priest said firmly.

Dale couldn’t help but smile at the man’s excitement. ‘That’s not really the point.’

‘That’s always the point.’ He was back on the altar now, pottering around, adjusting the position of plates and candles and embroidery to suit his own baffling idiosyncrasies.

‘No,’ said Dale, following to the edge of the marble steps. ‘The point is… I brought him home. It’s what he wanted.’

The priest’s frantic motions ceased. His eyes drifted across the empty chapel and then back to Dale. ‘I didn’t know there was a body,’ he said.

‘There wasn’t.’

‘Then—’

Dale allowed himself sit down in the front pew. ‘Most of what was recovered was unidentifiable,’ he said. ‘The temperatures, the impact. The undifferentiated remains were interned in Arlington.’

‘And those that were . . .  differentiated?’

Dale removed the small black canister from his jacket and stood it on the seat beside him. ‘Identified remains were returned to family,’ he said. ‘But Rodriguez didn’t have family.’

O’Grady looked at the small metal can. He very gently picked it up, surprised at its weight. ‘And this—’

‘The surviving remains of Commander Mike Rodriguez, USN. NASA Astronaut Group 19.’

The priest blessed himself.

‘We flew off the Truman together in the war,’ Dale said.

O’Grady frowned.

‘That’s what you do in a war, Padre. But wanting to go into space, that was different. We go in peace and all that?’

O’Grady was quiet for a long moment. ‘It occurs to me,’ he said at last, ‘that there’s something I should show you.’ Still holding the canister, he led Dale back into a dark corner of the church, through an old low door with a gothic arch.

‘Where are we going?’

‘You’ll see.’ The priest started on the tight spiral of the bell tower stairs and Dale trailed after him, his hand feeling the way along the undressed stone. It was dark and cold, the walls showing evidence of damp, and at the top was a cramped, shuttered room, the floor of which had been boarded out. There was no bell.

‘We replaced it,’ O’Grady said, as if reading Dale’s mind. He patted a fat loudspeaker affixed with brackets to the wall. ‘Bullhorn,’ he said, delighted with himself. ‘You’d never know the difference.’

‘Then what do you use this place for?’

‘Ah…’ O’Grady knelt by the far wall, beside a long bundle Dale had failed to notice. ‘I use it for this,’ the priest said, unwrapping the canvass and displaying its contents to the American.

‘A telescope?’

O’Grady grinned.

‘You have a telescope?’

‘Help me set it up.’ He passed Dale the tripod and then the mount as he went about inspecting the reflector.

Dale stood the tripod in the centre of the floor and began locking it into place.

‘A little higher,’ the priest said. ‘Yes, there. Perfect.’ He handed Dale the telescope itself. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘You know how to do this?’

‘Uh-hu.’

‘Great.’ He stood back and began to open up the wooden shutters.

The bright night streamed in, and beneath the colour of the Moon Dale could see the grey hills rolling off above the village. O’Grady caught him staring and took over assembly of the telescope.

‘The Burren,’ the priest said. ‘Bare stone for as far as you can see. No soil only in the cracks between the rocks, no rivers or lakes. Not enough water to drown a man, not enough wood to hang him—’

‘And not enough flat ground for him to land his aircraft.’ Dale shook his head and smiled. ‘Rock and mountains and boulders and dust.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Something Rodriguez told me once.’

‘You know,’ O’Grady said quietly, ‘you can’t wear the armband forever.’

‘Copy that.’ Dale thought about the hearings, the investigation, the names cut into the granite wall at Kennedy. He thought about those pieces of Aquarius laid out across the hanger floor, little more than scrap and garbage. Rodriguez, the tone of his voice; no worry or no anger, just surprise. Uh-oh.

There was nothing anybody could have done.

‘Here,’ O’Grady said, stepping back from the telescope. The American took his place above the instrument, turned the focus slightly and watched another world jump sharply into view. The Moon, itself a great mirror bathing in the sun; its soft mountains rising off romantic maria, the Ocean of Storms, the Sea of Rains, the Lakes of Excellence and Perseverance…

‘Man,’ Dale said, ‘that’s beautiful.’

O’Grady took a turn and murmured his agreement while Dale stood back and looked up at the sky. Mark-one eyeball, they called it in flight school. Sometimes there’s just no substitute.

‘There,’ he said suddenly, raising his arm to the southern sky where a new star bloomed and flew in a short arc before fading back again into the darkness. ‘The Space Station,’ Dale said. ‘Will you look at that.’

The priest peered up just in time. ‘Impressive,’ he said.

Dale laughed. ‘I could have gone there once, you know.’

‘You can’t still go?’

‘I suppose. Take a ride with the Russians. Ah, but it wouldn’t be the same. I’m a pilot, an explorer. I’m not a hitchhiker.’

O’Grady nodded.

‘You know,’ Dale said, ‘I can still remember going to the Space Centre as a kid and asking my mom if I could stay up all night when they landed the first man on Mars.’ He laughed. ‘I really thought they’d do it too. Hell, I thought I’d get to do it once I joined the programme.’

‘Could happen yet.’

‘Maybe,’ said Dale, ‘but then again maybe it’s as well I’m out. Space is hungry, Padre. This business, it devours people. I’ve been devoured by it. It mightn’t hurt to take the time to…’ He trailed off.  I don’t know.’

‘Yes you do.’

The astronaut smiled. ‘To consider it, I suppose. To get my head around it.’

O’Grady leaned back against the wall. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’ll bury your friend here if you like. But are you sure that’s what he wanted?’

Dale stared at the canister where the priest had placed it on the floor and considered the sad strange journey which had brought it here, all the questions which surrounded it. He looked out through the open shutters, across the otherworldly hills. Nothing was certain anymore, nothing at all.

Rodriguez, if he could have seen him, would have laughed his ass off.

#

Soon after that he left O’Grady in the tower. There’d been a chaplain of the same mold aboard the Truman, he recalled; could get inside your head like nobody’s business. It was not a shock to find another here; priests were all of a kind, Dale thought, though even so there was something very likeable about O’Grady. Not the astronomy or even the rudimentary philosophy. No, it was completely separate. He dared to call it enthusiasm and immediately felt bad.

Making his way down the narrow stairs and out through the church, Dale found Bartley and McGovern waiting outside for him, the latter with the palm of his hand pressed firm against the wall.

‘Heard you’d finally gone to see the priest,’ McGovern said.

‘This one was worried for ya,’ Bartley added, shaking his head.

McGovern shrugged. ‘Civility never broke a man’s jaw’.

‘Clearly you’ve never been in a pilots’ ready room,’ Dale said. ‘But thank you, Gerry. I appreciate it.’

‘Come on now,’ said Bartley. ‘Tell us, is your business done?’

‘My business is done here,’ he said. ‘But I’ve got one more thing to do, if you want to join me…’

‘You’ll stand us the line?’ the old man asked with a wink.

Dale grinned, the keys to his rental car already in his hand. ‘Sure.’

Ten minutes later they were out of the village, crystal moonlight making everything unreal as they drove into The Burren. The pale-faced sky-child of earlier was gone, as was the golden hue of dusk, the Moon’s disc having slipped to a colder, sterner blue which cast long, chaotic shadows all round them. Hills squeezed the twisting road and each shape was another sculpture in a garden of demented stone where everything became reverent and cruel. In a field by the road with the light streaming through it, the silhouette of a horse stood proud on the hilltop. Dale thought he glimpsed an empty saddle on its back but couldn’t know for sure. They drove on.

He remembered, back in training, Rodriguez and himself; still young men, men who had fought together, who had chosen a most dangerous profession.

‘You’ll take me back to Houston?’ Dale had said.

‘If you take me back to County Clare.’

Beer-bottle necks had clinked at the arrangement, but Dale never thought he’d have to see it through, never once reckoned that he’d end up here with his friend in a metal can.

‘What’d’ya think,’ McGovern said. ‘Does this look good?’

Dale nodded, ‘Yeah.’ He pulled in from the road and stopped the engine. Everything was silent. Leaning over the steering wheel, he stared into the sky where the spirit of his friend flew free. The image of disintegration was burned into his mind. The whirling debris, the cloud of vapour when the remaining hydrogen and oxygen collapsed against each other. Aquarius, he thought; the water carrier.

The president had made a speech which came back to him from time to time. ‘The cause for which they died will go on,’ he’d said. ‘Our journey into space will continue.’ He quoted it to Bartley and McGovern.

‘Always liked him,’ Bartley said. ‘A good lad, now. A good lad.’

‘Yes,’ said Dale, who had met him once, a tall, sad man whose ambition had surpassed his reach. ‘I guess he always seemed to be.’ He picked up the canister and opened the door of the car. ‘Let’s go.’ He led them out onto the bare shoulder, through the stile and up into a steep, rocky field. There was no soil, or very little anyway, and it was odd, he thought, to recognise the kind of features he had been trained to see on lunar missions, erratics and stratigraphic markers. He picked up a stone from the rough surface and turned it over in his hand.

‘What’s that?’ McGovern asked.

‘The technical term is FLR. At least according to Rodriguez.’

‘FLR?’

‘Funny Looking Rock.’ He smiled as he dropped it to the ground. Rodriguez always said that levity was appropriate in a dangerous trade and he was right, Dale realized, as he picked his way through loose stones, careful not to lose his footing on the crumpled ground. One had to be able to laugh at one’s self, at the job, at the danger.

‘Woah,’ he said, catching his toe in one of the great, deep cracks which slithered everywhere.

Bartley sniggered. ‘You alright there, Dale?’

‘Yeah,’ the American said. ‘Thanks.’

They were on the true Burren now, a vast, wrinkled plain of undulating stone weathered into near oblivion. A kaleidoscope of grey, it spread on and on, beyond history, beyond the night, out of sight beyond Dale’s unrelenting dreams. Behind them, the few stray streetlights of the village sparkled in the distance, and, above, the wash of moonlight made it seem another world entirely.

It was, Dale decided, as good a place as any. ‘Here,’ he said.

Beside him Bartley nodded. ‘When they buried my brother it wasn’t like this,’ he said, ‘it was a fine spring day.’

Dale and McGovern both turned to look at him, startled by his openness.

‘He was a hero,’ Bartley went on. ‘Of the kind they name streets after, you know? Brought down a lot of them lot here at the time.’

‘The Tans,’ McGovern said. ‘The British.’

‘Aye,’ said Bartley. ‘And they’d men from his column there to see him away, draping the tricolour across his box, a few of them with rifles that they let off. The noise of it all,’ he said. ‘Twas a fierce honour.’

Dale cast him an unsure look. ‘You’re not… armed now, are you Bartley?’

The old man laughed, a booming ho-ho as loud as any shot. ‘Not at all. Not at all, a’course. I’m just saying, you know, the moment should be marked.’

‘And what had you in mind?’ McGovern asked.

Bartley grinned, and with great effort brought himself to his full height. He raised his right arm and bent his elbow, bringing his hand to his head in a salute. McGovern quickly did the same.

Dale nodded, and carefully he opened up the flask, tipping its cremated contents out onto the breeze. The cloud flattened out at once, dove towards the rocky pavement, and then took flight, specks of ash like busy stars exploding all around him while the world turned overhead. Dale straightened up and saluted too, the remains of Rodriguez taking wing into the night.

When it was over he brought his hand down and, behind him, his two friends mumbled something as they let their own arms fall, Bartley rubbing at his shoulder.

‘We should take a stroll now,’ McGovern said quietly.

‘What?’ Bartley said.

‘You know, as we’re here, we should give Dale the air of the place.’

‘Ah, will you not be—’

‘No,’ Dale said. He laid his hand on Bartley’s shoulder, ‘I’d like that.’ He was tired, that was true, it was late, and yet some new energy was coming to him. It compelled him to move, to walk, to see what he could find.

‘Well then,’ McGovern said, ‘come on so,’ and he led them out across the hillside.

They were at last, Dale thought, the crew he had imagined, ambling across this odd terrain with the strange, loping gait required to leap from one great limestone block to another. Step-by-step the three of them picked their way across the broken surface, away from the road, away from the lights of the village and everything that Dale had come to know. This was a separate place, severe and beautiful and altogether alien. There, in the stone, were red and orange tints which he could not explain. In the sky, the universe’s mechanism whirled while the three men drifted on, and, as the grey rock fell off toward the close horizon, they could have been walking on the moon.

Val Nolan lectures at National University of Ireland, Galway. His fiction has previously appeared on the ‘Futures’ page of Nature and in magazines and newspapers such as Cosmos, The Irish Times, and The Daily Telegraph. His academic publications include ‘Flann, Fantasy, and Science Fiction: O’Brien’s Surprising Synthesis’ (Review of Contemporary Fiction, Flann O’Brien special, 2011) and ‘If it was Just Th’ ol Book…: A History of the John McGahern Banning Controversy’ (Irish Studies Review, 2011). Forthcoming work includes ‘Break Free: Understanding, Reimagining, and Reclaiming Stories in Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers of Victory’ (Journal of Graphic Novels and Comic Books, 2014) and a chapter on Lost and Battlestar Galactica in Godly Heretics: Essays on Alternative Christianity in Literature and Popular Culture (McFarland, 2013). He is a regular literary critic for the Irish Examiner.

Continue reading »]]> She knows the thousand and one secret names of snow,
whispers them up into the clouds,
calling the snow to her like a lover,
and waits for white touches sunk in drifts.
It is then that he sees her,
pale and fallen, in a bank on the side of the road.
Panicked, he thinks her dead, dying, rushes over
wading through three kinds of snow to reach her.
He kneels, taking hold of her wrist, hoping to find her alive
and is surprised when she opens her cold blue eyes.

She is never really sure why she left her chilly covers
to walk beside him, to listen and speak.
She usually avoids people
preferring the quiet company of crystals and slush.
He is much noisier.
He takes her for coffee, which she does not drink.
But she rests her chill hands against the cup
marveling at the colors of it, and he tells her
about his family in warmer climes
and how he came to be here rather than there.
She nods, pretending to understand.
She tells him about the wonders of flake and blizzard,
about flurries in forests and ice rains on plains.
“Snow is so much more than water,” she says, looking into his eyes earnestly.
“And water is so much more than snow,” he replies.
She smiles then, but will not meet his eyes again that night.

She knows so many names, but finds more she does not know.
The world seems filled with things not snowy.
These things puzzle her and she puzzles him
when they meet once a week and walk, through the snow, for coffee.
She enjoys watching the way his breath becomes visible,
names the snow silently when it sticks in his hair and on his gloves.
He sighs, staring out the window at the white
and wishes for spring and an end to all this snow.
She sighs, looking down at her coffee, going cold now,
and wishes for an endless winter to spend with him.

She does not know how to tell lies,
her tongue sticks cold to her mouth when she tries.
He does not know how to truly see her,
expectations rime his eyes with frost.
It cannot last. No winter really lasts.
For him, water is so much more than snow, but not for her.
She knows the thousand and one secret names for snow
and one of them is hers.

Cislyn Smith likes playing pretend, playing games, and playing with words. She calls Madison, WI her home. She has been known to crochet tentacles, write stories at odd hours, and study stone dead languages. She is occasionally dismayed by the lack of secret passages in her house. This is her first professional publication.

Continue reading »]]> The Metallic Destroyer, they call me, the Nightmare. No blood-blushed lips. No quivering eyelashes. Not one follicle of hair. My pumps hiss at varying rates: thirty and ten and fifteen compressions a minute. Each system whirring with its separate sound: circulatory and lymphatic and so much more. I no longer speak, but I can hear: Little Miss Nightmare, they call me, just another teenage bad dream.

#

Skin cells don’t heal. The membrane tears, the mechanism stutters, organelles leak out beyond their lipid wall, and then finally the entire mess is subsumed by the body’s cleanup crew. The immune system, people call it. Killers are what they really mean as the macrophages enthusiastically envelope their prey. Even at the cellular level, human bodies have no problem killing their own. The goal, after all, is preservation of the whole.

‘Preservation’ is a word my Momma always unreservedly embraced. At sixteen, after a decade of waiting, I’m ready to crush it.

#

Golden-curled and five years old, it was only a matter of time until I figured Momma out: the costumes and makeup, the perfectly white teeth, all those hours spent rehearsing on our brown, matted living room rug.

All for Momma and her Little Miss Dream Team title.

Winners persevere, Momma told me. Survival is the key. By survival she meant poise and grace and cherubic unmarked skin. All those contest points piling up as I walked the well-lit stage. Judges, with their carefully maintained smiles, offered up their numbers on white rectangular boards. Five might be young, but even then I could smell it; somehow, Momma had gotten it wrong.

The city tasted foul through my unfiltered mouth. My eyes watered whenever I stepped outside. Still, I smiled across that wooden stage. Momma’s hands gripped mine as we stood together in our bleeding pink and lace. The spotlights hid all eyes but hers as we sang our duet.

#

The lining of the human stomach is replaced in less than three days. Skin cells only last a couple of weeks. Red blood cells don’t even get half a year. The body of a forty-year-old woman carries, at most, microscopic traces of the child she once was. Course, Momma had no idea what I was thinking. It wasn’t just age that separated Momma from me.

Despite the hair dye, the weight charts, and all the sprays that colored our skin, there were only a handful of ribbons above our mantel and one lone plaque—no trophy. Meanwhile, outside, the city’s welded, metallic Little Miss Nightmares roamed lipless and free. The truth was easy to dissect: transformation, not “survival,” was the natural order of things.

#

Sixteen is the age of no regrets. It’s also the age of consent. The light shone white across my naked flesh. “Count backwards from ten,” they told me. I could see their pink lips moving beneath the cotton masks. I breathed in deeply, closed my eyes. Only my feet felt the chill.

When I woke up the spotlight was gone. Strange violet shades filled my eyes, extra blues and a few more shades of red.

It was what they left behind that surprised me: the ribs, the irises and both corneas. Lines still ran wild along the palms of my hands. Despite all the money and the long hours of work, it was a patchwork job: the metal struts visible across my torso. My breasts were gone along with most of my skin.

Still, it could have been worse.

#

I used to be so sad at five and then at ten and finally at sixteen, despite the broad pouting lips that drew in the band boys with the puppy-dog eyes. Black t-shirts hung from their frames. Smoke trailed from their fingers.

I can smoke my own cigarettes now. No worries about tongue cancer or wrinkled skin. No lips, of course. I consume energy in different ways. Even my teeth are gone.

#

When I was younger, Momma wrapped my hair in those cheap, pink curlers, scrubbed my skin clean. So much unlined skin.

“Don’t touch,” she’d say, slapping my hands away from my face.

The makeup itched. My hair felt like lacquered straw. Momma and I wore matching dresses of cyber-pink and a shade of midnight-blue eyeshadow designed exclusively for the pageant floor. No matter the venue, our talent was always the same: the song “Don’t Know Much.” Momma sang the Aaron Neville part while I warbled Linda Ronstadt’s lyrics.

I got a mini marshmallow every time I got my words right.

#

I didn’t even tell my Momma before I headed out. Didn’t see the point.

Doves are the symbol of peace. That’s what the receptionist told me when I entered the Pagette Medical Center. I stood before her desk, staring up at the picture hanging on the wall. A soot-covered pigeon, or perhaps a crow, was reaching for the branch in a dove’s beak. The dove seemed unconcerned. Perhaps he was ready to let that branch go.

Living in the city, I know something about birds, more than the artist it seemed. The garbage pickers and the peace bringers are not all that different from each other. Dove, it turns out, is just another word for pigeon. We’re all garbage pickers in the end.

All willing to let go of our branches and battle for what remains.

#

I could hear the whispers from across the street: Little Miss Nightmare. I took a step and then another, resting for a moment on the concrete walk, listening to the rasp of all those shiny new pumps. Looking at more colors than I ever imagined.

I could taste the electric current running along the wires. I could smell the anger in the air. The colors of their sidewalk-screams as I strode forward were brighter than either cyber-pink or midnight-blue. I had my metal trophy, finally, shuffling across the concrete floor.

Julie Day recently graduated from the Stonecoast M.F.A. program. During the day she writes IT documents as well as documents of the more fictional variety. Julie is the host of Small Beer Press’s occasional podcasting series. Some of her favorite things include gummy candies, loose teas and standing desks. You can find Julie online at http://www.stillwingingit.com.

Continue reading »]]> These woods will not harm you, mother says,
and you believe her.

These trees will not hurt you, she tells you,
and you go walking among them, and through.

You wear your new cloak, walking in the woods;
its color the same red
as the apples you carry in your basket,
and the blood

washed clean.

You wear your new cloak, hood pulled tight,
and your shoes—black and shiny—and

feel the sun on your hands and face.
You go walking among the trees, and through,

and you carry your cheese and bread, wine and fruit,
apples red as your new cloak, and you step lightly

along the path.

These woods are not made to harm you, your mother says,
and you believe her.

So you walk.

It’s only when you meet the wolf,
and you’re not yet scared, do you realize—

these trees are not made to hurt you,
but sometimes the shadows lurk

inside.

Stefanie Maclin’s poetry and short stories have appeared in such publications as Illumen, Dreams & Nightmares, Battered Suitcase, and Conversation Poetry Quarterly. When she is not writing, she works as a librarian. She lives in Boston’s MA. For a complete listing of her writing credits, please visit http://thesilentpoet.live journal.com.

Continue reading »]]> For the first few years of his life, the boy didn’t know the Still Room was there. To him, the heavy wooden door was simply the point at which the cellar stairs ended, just as the pantry was where they began. He often played on those stairs, enjoying the cool dampness and the reassuring sound of the kitchen floorboards creaking above his head as Mrs. Henderson prepared supper. He would sit in the coolness and run his toy cars over the grey stone, and think of adventures for his tin soldiers. Sometimes he would search for a toy for hours before finally finding that he had left it two or three steps above the wooden door while playing on the stairs. But as for what lay beyond that door, he gave little thought. It was like the locked drawers in his mother’s desk, or the trunk in the attic warped shut with rust and age. Something beyond his reach, and not interesting enough to consider further.

The first time he tried to open the door, he was perhaps six years old. Certainly young enough that his chubby hands could scarcely clasp the massive iron handle. Later, he would be unable to recall what had sparked his curiosity after years of disinterest; he would remember only how strong and impenetrable the door seemed. He pushed down on the latch with both thumbs, but it stayed still even when he dangled from the handle with his full weight. After that, he thought about the door more often. He tried on other occasions to open it, thinking each time that he simply hadn’t been strong enough on the last attempt. Each time, it refused to budge.

One day, as the boy tugged on the door with one hand, model airplane dangling from the other, his mother’s voice drifted down the stairs. “Darling? What are you. . .” Her voice trailed off as she saw him jump quickly away from the door. She looked surprised for a moment, and maybe a little frightened, but she laughed and pushed a dark curl of hair behind her ear. “Oh, sweetheart, you mustn’t feel guilty. What little boy wouldn’t be curious? And besides, it will be yours one day.”

“Can I go inside, Mummy?” he asked.

She scooped him up in her arms, resting his weight on her rounded hip. “Oh, no, darling, never. You must promise me that you will never, ever go in that room. Do you understand? We can look inside, but we can’t open the door.”

She smiled as she said it, and he smelled her breath, the peppermint leaves she liked to chew. “I promise,” he said, and he meant it, because he felt certain in that moment that she wasn’t just trying to keep something from him.

“Right, then, let’s take a look, shall we?”

In the upper part of the door, at the level of his mother’s face, there was a square of black metal with a keyhole just like the one near the handle. The boy’s mother reached inside the neck of her dress and fished out a chain with an iron key dangling from it. He hoped that she would open the door completely, but instead she unlocked the little window. “There, darling, can you see?” she asked, holding him up.

The first thing he saw was a stone wall speckled with green moss. It was illuminated by a large fire burning in the hearth. But the fire looked wrong, the boy realized. It didn’t move. He could clearly see the orange flames, lightening to yellow at the edges, and the deep red glow of coals at the center. But none of it moved.

Then, to the left of the hearth, he saw the men.

They stood in the center of the room, facing each other across a distance of about five feet. Except they didn’t stand, they strained towards each other; one man’s left foot was raised just slightly off the ground in mid-step, while the other had his knees bent into a crouch as though about to spring. But neither moved. Their feet stayed in the same position, their hands didn’t tremble, the draft of cold air in the cellar didn’t move the hair on their heads.

The boy tore his eyes away from the two men and craned his head so that he could see the room’s other walls. All held torches, bright and flaming yet frozen.

“Why aren’t they moving, Mummy?” the boy asked at last, petulant in his confusion.

“They are,” his mother whispered as though they could hear. “They’re just moving very, very slowly. So slowly we can’t see it. Your great-great-grandfather spent his life measuring their speed. He calculated that they move only one quarter of an inch forward every year. At the start, hundreds of years ago, they were on opposite sides of the room. Can you imagine?”

The boy looked back at the men. He studied their clothes. One, who the boy would learn to call the Knight, wore thin linen hose and a dark green woolen shirt that hung almost to his knees. His feet were wrapped in rough leather shoes. Despite the crude-looking clothing, a gold pendant hung around his neck and he wore a ring with a large blue gemstone. He held a long sword in both hands, awkwardly extending out from shoulder level. The boy could faintly see the Knight’s bared teeth, and a drop of spittle frozen in the air beneath his bearded chin.

The second, who the boy would come to think of as the Squire, wore even rougher clothes, his baggy trousers made of patched, blotchy wool. He seemed young, although the boy couldn’t make out much of his face. He had black hair tied at the nape of his neck in a leather thong. His shapeless tunic was unlaced at the top to reveal pale, hairless flesh. In his right hand, he held a kind of club with metal spikes emerging from the top. It hung in the air over his head, caught in an arc between himself and the Knight.

Along the walls hung some shields, along with several strange weapons. There were trunks and boxes in several of the corners, and barrels lining one entire end of the room. One small patch of floor seemed to serve as a simple bed, with a pallet and thin blanket. A rough wooden table lay on its side, knocked carelessly out of the way. Try as he might, the boy could not divine the room’s purpose.

“Why are they fighting, Mummy?”

She set him down on the stones and closed the window. “No one remembers. Some say the Knight. . . did, did something, to the Squire’s sweetheart. There’s another story, that the Squire stole from the Knight and was caught. There are other stories, ones I’ll tell you when you’re older.” She laughed quietly. “But, really, we don’t even know if they actually are a knight and his squire. It’s been forgotten.”

The boy stared at the dark wood of the door, silent. “Then. . . Why are they there?”

She started to say something, hesitated, bit her lip. “We can’t be sure. The important thing, though, is that we have a very, very special job. We’re guardians.”

The boy silently considered the word. Guardians. It felt noble, and important. “How? How do we guard them, Mummy?”

“We have to keep this door closed, and never, ever tell anyone that they are there.”

The boy’s excitement deflated into mild disappointment; he’d been picturing battles, epic defenses of their charges, the way it happened in the stories of knights and kings Mummy read him before bed. “So that’s all we have to do to keep the Knight and the Squire safe?” he asked, hoping vaguely that there was more to it than that.

“No, darling,” his mother replied gently, and when the boy was a man he would realize it was the first time she had spoken to him like he was an adult. “It’s not those two we’re keeping safe. It’s the rest of us.”

#

Then came the days of bombs, and blackouts, and ration cards. Mrs. Henderson went to work as an ambulance driver, and a lot of the ladies Mummy knew went to be nurses or secretaries, or take other jobs the boy didn’t quite understand. Many of the boy’s friends went away to the country, and before she left to drive the ambulance Mrs. Henderson tried to convince Mummy to send him away as well. “He’s only ten, Ma’am! He shouldn’t be here, not now. Your uncle still has that lovely house in Yorkshire, why don’t—”

“Thank you, Mrs. Henderson,” Mummy said icily, sounding unkind for one of the few times in the boy’s memory. “But that won’t be necessary. We’ll be safe here.”

Mrs. Henderson looked as if she wanted to say more, but just shook her head. She kissed the boy on the cheek and cast him a pitying look as she left with her suitcase. “Be safe, lad. Take care of your Mum.”

On the nights when the sirens went, the boy and his mother went down to the cellar and sat with their backs against the wooden door. Mummy assured him it would be safe, but she still flinched whenever they heard a bomb fall nearby. She often had dark circles under her eyes now, and the boy began to notice strands of grey in the deep brown of her hair. Even after nights when they had no sleep because of the bombs, she left for her job early in the morning. She’d been forced to take the boy with her once, when the road to his school was blocked, and he had spent a bewildering morning watching her and four other women bustle about and shuffle papers and tell people whose houses had been bombed where they would be staying now. He’d watched the line of grubby, silent people and thought of the bomb craters and piles of rubble where there had once been buildings, new ones every time he went with Mummy while she did the shopping. He wondered when he and Mummy would have to join that line of sad people.

In the years since she had shown him the Still Room, they had spoken of it only occasionally. There had been times when he had asked to see it again and she had gone down to the cellar with her key. The boy had tried to detect the slow movement of their bodies, but couldn’t be sure if anything had changed. Mummy had always indulged these requests, but never seemed to want to stay in the cellar or discuss it for very long.

Now they didn’t speak of it at all, even though they spent so many of their nights leaning against the door. At first it was because they were both too busy thinking of other things. Then, the boy realized that Mummy had always been a little frightened when she talked about it, although she hid it well; he understood that they didn’t speak of it anymore because there was too much fear already.

One night, when the raids were particularly bad, he asked a question in nervousness without really thinking about it. “Did Father know about the Still Room?”

Mummy’s eyes tilted toward the ceiling as the shrieking whine of a falling bomb passed overhead. “No,” she said after they heard the explosion. “Seeing that would have ruined him. I told him when he proposed that there would be only one secret I would ever keep from him, and that he could only marry me if he could bear never knowing.” She let out a little laugh. “He kept his word, and never asked me about it once, even though he lived with it right under his feet the entire time, and I know he must have wondered. Oh, he was such a patient man. I wish so that you could remember him.”

The boy stared into their lantern light and pulled his blanket tighter around his shoulders. “Why would it have ruined him?”

“He was very logical, very scientific. He couldn’t bear superstition, it was the only thing that could make him truly angry. If he’d seen that room, his whole world would have fallen apart.”

“Why?”

The boy felt her turn to look at him in the half-darkness. “Because, what else could have created that room, except for God?”

Something fretful moved in the boy’s stomach. He’d never heard her talk about God. He went to Church with Aunt Maureen, not Mummy. Once or twice, he’d heard whispers about the fact that his mother was never there. He had never thought to ask, but he realized now that before this moment he would have said if pressed that she didn’t believe.

“Why would God do that?”

“I believe that he granted us a reprieve. He didn’t stop what’s happening in that room, that battle, but he slowed it.” The convulsive shudder of anti-aircraft guns sounded from the east. “He gave us more time. It’s not just the room either, it’s the house; this house has survived everything. The Great Fire, Cromwell, every other horrible thing that’s happened in the last six hundred years, all of it.”

The boy understood now why they stayed at home instead of going to the shelters like other people. More planes groaned overhead. “What do you think will happen when they reach each other? The Knight and the Squire?” he whispered.

“Oh, I think the world will end.” Her voice came out flat amidst the clatter of the fight raging above them.

The boy felt a sensation like falling, and he bit down on his tongue in an effort not to panic. Mummy must have realized how much her words frightened him, because she took his hand in her own. “But they won’t reach each other yet, not for generations. And do you know what that means?” She waited, but he didn’t respond. “That means, the world isn’t ending now.”

The fear didn’t leave him, but it settled, and he leaned against her shoulder. He fell asleep, and in his dreams airplanes dropped death from the sky and everything burned except him and Mummy and the Still Room.

#

On a different night, one in which the sirens sounded and he and Mummy slept in the cellar, the boy awoke with his heart pounding and his stomach twisted in fear. At first he thought it was just one of the bombs, which often kept him in a state of fitful half-sleep, but something about this was different. Mummy sat too still, and her hand squeezed his arm so hard it hurt. “Mum—”

“Shh,” she hissed, and then the boy heard the creaking of footsteps on the kitchen floorboards. He remembered, now, that the sound of breaking glass had been what jerked him out of sleep.

The boy held his breath, listening to the sounds of someone rummaging through the house, objects dropped, doors opening. Over all these sounds his pulse hammered in his ears, and Mummy’s breath came in quick gasps like she’d been running.

The footsteps returned to the kitchen and the door to the cellar swung open. Things clattered as they were knocked off the pantry shelves, and then a beam of torchlight swept down the stairs and settled on the two of them. The boy closed his eyes against the harsh light while Mummy let out a little cry.

“Don’t scream. Not a word, hear?” The man’s voice came out in a rough, low whisper.

“Please,” Mummy said, “there’s jewelry upstairs—”

“I said, shut it!” A pause, then. “What’s in there?”

“Nothing,” Mummy answered. “Just an old wine cellar, please. . .”

“Bollocks.” The boy still couldn’t make out a face behind the torchlight, but he could see the man’s bulky form as he shuffled awkwardly down the stone steps. Mummy clambered to her feet as he neared the bottom, her hands half raised in a pleading gesture. The boy stayed seated, legs weak and rubbery.

The man pointed the torch right into Mummy’s eyes, so that she had to wince and turn her face away. He had a short, stocky build, with lank hair falling into his eyes. A bulging canvas bag hung from his left hand. The boy’s nostrils filled with the man’s rank, unwashed odor.

“Open it.”

“I can’t, I don’t have—”

The man dropped the bag and hit her, an open hand across the side of her face. She staggered to the side, blood already trickling from the corner of her mouth. “Bitch, I told you to open it!”

“Please, you don’t understand, I can’t—”

He hit her again, this time in the stomach with a closed fist. She crumpled against the wall, gasping for breath. The boy found himself on his feet. He threw himself at the man, fists swinging; they connected, but the blows hurt his knuckles and seemed to glance harmlessly off the man’s body. Then a callused hand encircled his throat, and the back of his head hit stone, and his feet kicked in search of the ground.

“You little shit,” the man growled. Through the haze of sparks invading his vision, the boy dimly heard his mother scream. It wasn’t a sound of pain or panic, though, but rage.

“Stop! I’ll open it! I’ll give you everything you want!” she shrieked.

The fingers loosened but didn’t leave his throat. “Do it now, or I’ll snap his fucking neck.”

She fished the key out from under the neck of her nightgown. She didn’t look frightened anymore but hard, determined. She unlocked the door and flung it open, stepping back quickly.

The man let the boy slip to the ground, forgotten. He stared, took a hesitant step forward, stopped. “What the hell is this?” He sounded nervous for the first time.

“A fortune,” his mother murmured. “That sword. The ring on the Knight’s finger. Everything else, the shield hanging on the wall, the contents of the trunk, it’s all centuries old. The things in this room are worth more than the Crown Jewels.”

“But what. . . What is it?” he snapped, looking wildly between her and the scene in the room.

“You don’t need to understand that. All that’s important is that they can’t move, they can’t stop you. You can take it all.” She lowered her eyes, and the boy could see something false in the way she spoke. “This is my family fortune, but if saves my son, take it.”

The man hesitated, throat working as he swallowed. Then, “You try anything to stop me, and that boy dies first.”

“I know.”

The man nodded and moved into the room, pausing to scoop up the bag full of their things from upstairs. He walked with timid steps toward the Knight and the Squire, as though afraid they would suddenly spring into motion.

It didn’t happen right away. He passed through the threshold at normal speed. The boy saw his steps slow, and thought it was just caution. But then the man’s sixth step into the room seemed to take minutes, his foot rising and returning to the floor with excruciating slowness. His arms, instead of moving normally at his sides, drifted as if floating underwater. On his next step, the man began to turn his head, to look back at the boy and his mother. The boy saw his blunt, filthy face in profile, halfway through the turn. After that, he could see no movement at all.

Finally, the boy turned away from the sight of the intruder and looked up at Mummy. She stood illuminated by the room’s unmoving firelight, one white-knuckled hand gripping the edge of the door. She stared at the thief, jaw set and eyes narrowed. Blood stained the white skin of her face, and a violet bruise had begun to form on one cheekbone. Then, without a word, she shut the door and locked it. Scooping the boy up in her arms, she held him tight and let him weep.

#

The boy grew up, while his mother grew older. The war ended, and the city’s lights returned, and the cellar once again became a place they rarely went. One day, after he came home from university, his mother said she was getting too old to climb the cellar stairs and wished to move to a smaller house; he didn’t believe her, but he saw the pleading look in her eyes and smiled and let her put the chain with the key around his neck. He quickly became accustomed to the weight of it under his shirt. When he saw her happiness during visits to her little cottage he realized how much staying in the house had cost her.

The day came when he brought his new wife to live with him in the house, and he told her of the responsibility he had and that one of their children would one day inherit. She understood, and said she loved him, but never returned to the cellar after the day he showed her the Still Room. One day he found his daughter at the foot of the stone steps, fumbling with the latch, and he lifted her up and showed her the Still Room, and told her stories of the Knight, and the Squire, and the Thief. Later, he did the same for his grandson, even though he was now old and his back ached when he lifted the boy in his arms. First his daughter and then her son, when they were old enough, heard what his mother had believed about what would happen when the Knight and the Squire finally met in combat.

Now the old man watches his second grandchild, a girl, toddling about the kitchen and wonders if he will still be alive to show her the room as he did her mother and her older brother. He hopes so. He would like a chance to tell the stories once again.

But there is one thing he will not speak of. Over the decades, he has been able to perceive small changes in the men. He has seen how the hate-filled eyes of the Knight and the rage of the Squire have shifted away from one another. He has seen how their gaze has now turned in the direction of the Thief, this interloper in their incomprehensible reckoning. The feet of the Squire, once pointed ever so resolutely toward the Knight, have turned toward the Thief. The Knight’s sword is no longer angled at the Squire’s throat, but at this more distant figure. And the Thief has managed to turn just slightly toward the door, enough so that his stance can be recognized as one of retreat. Perhaps he is imagining it, but the old man thinks the Knight and the Squire already seem to be catching up.

And as for what will happen to the world when they reach him, the old man cannot say.

Jamie Killen’s stories have appeared in numerous short fiction anthologies and magazines, including Read by Dawn Volumes II and III, Drabblecast, and Heiresses of Russ 2013 (forthcoming). She lives in Arizona.

Continue reading »]]> Upon waking in a dampened bed—and it had been a poor idea to sleep in the Summer Room, but that was the way of Summer, wasn’t it? to make you forget its weight—your thoughts got all sidetracked by the languid scent of lilacs, and thunderstorms, and berries so fresh they were still hot from the sun. The Summer Room simmered, with sweating flesh at sundown, cool drinks, lies told, and oh the heat-haze, hay-scented, lying naked, running fingertips down your skin.

But when you actually spent the night, Summer was fitful, exhausting, soggy sheets all in a tangle, and feeling too drained to get up and leave. Never falling fully sleep, but having baked-brain visions.

You think you’d learn. But when you’re shriveling cold in the Winter Room, it may happen that the Slave wistfully speaks of a hot Summer night: that time when a breeze found its way through the curtains, and they bellied in the moonlight. You remember standing bare-skinned in the Summer breeze’s embrace, and no moment could be more perfect, or filled with Desire. Oh, Autumn is Yearning and Spring Ambition, Winter is Hunger and the Fifth is Greed-For-Oblivion, but Summer’s heat arouses Desire: so sultry, so fleshy, so young.

That’s the reason, isn’t it really, to spend a night in Summer: the desire for Desire.

So up from the bed and past the husks of whatever they were—sweating flesh at sundown. They were rounded you remember (at least the tasty parts were), and there were three of them and they sang. They sang and they steamed and they smelled of it doesn’t matter because now they smell different, a little earthen because of the rot.

You say, “Slave,” and the Slave appears.

Your Slave looks earthen itself, worn and wormy from too many Deeds. (Deeds of War, Deeds of Example.) The Slave looks quite peaked, and oh, the lust, the lust for a Change. It’s time to trade up for another, that’s where this has all been going—the visions, the dissatisfaction, yes, it’s time to Tempt a new Slave.

Out of the room and Summer ends. Today, the Palace has chosen to be glassy. You’ve never deciphered the Palace’s Patterns, but it conducts its own Dramas, with no connection to yours except perhaps when you’re awakened by the scrape of large furniture moving, or the Hall of Regrets becomes another fifty paces longer to accommodate a new mural. Once, a red velvet rope blocked the Autumn Room’s door, and now and then the Portal Wing goes missing, but the Wing is in its proper place this morning.

Today, the door is a mouth. For the sake of precaution, you send the Slave through first. Oh now how did the wretched creature get such scars on its back? Really, the Slave’s whole point is that healing charms always work! Well, not the whole point but a bit. You summon your magic and you’re about to smooth the scars, when you remember you’re getting a new Slave because this one has grown tiresome. Then you remember you thought the same thing the last time you noticed the scars, and you wonder how often Time has made this moment repeat.

You don’t wonder very hard. Like the Palace, Time conducts its own Dramas, and if you’re occasionally inconvenienced by the backwash, that’s the price of living with roommates.

The Portal Wing is as glassy as the rest of the Palace, so naturally the portals have expressed themselves as Mirrors. That’s better than mouths, but not as good as paintings or when they were those little cakes filled with surprises. The cakes were lovely, and of course, the mazes, and the libraries, and the drownings, but Mirrors are fine, you can do things with Mirrors . . . oh look stars. This must be the Mirror of a great telescope, curved like a birdbath but ten times the size, big enough to see all the way to the back of the universe.

If such a thing exists. “Speak, Slave. Does your universe have a back?”

“Do you wish it to have a back?”

“I don’t care, but maybe I do,” and you wait to see if a Preference arises. Nothing happens, and anyway, why? The Slave can be so annoying. But a new Slave will have Free Will (for a night), and that always produces Dramas.

Your Dramas are surely much finer than the Palace’s or Time’s. You feel certain they envy you, as do all beings everywhere. But of course they won’t say so—they suffer from Pride. Besides, they can’t talk; at least they don’t talk to you. The three of you don’t have that kind of relationship.

You kneel by the telescope’s Mirror, and take up the Key that hangs around your neck . . . but before you Sunder the Veil, you remember and make yourself comely to Slave-ish eyes. The change requires a vast expenditure of power, for this isn’t just illusion, but a complete transformation: unscaled skin and, what’s-it-called, hair, your teeth go all blunt and that blood-pumping thing that makes you self-conscious of your Stirrings. Sometimes you like your Stirrings, you want to bask in them like soap. Just not every waking moment.

The Slave race are slaves to their Blood-Pumps from the day they are born. They should be grateful when you become master, instead of those bloody Pumps. Your yoke is light and also rational, unlike that thump-thump-thump which now beats in your own chest as well as a Slave’s.

Oh look, now the beat is accelerating. Well. Let’s treat it as another roommate, pursuing its own Dramas. Any overlap with your activities is coincidence.

You lower the Key to the Mirror, and abruptly the burn of embarrassment, because Key, Mirror, the symbols don’t fit. The old Slave is watching, and the Blood-Pump is too, and you’re galled that anyone sees you unable to think your way forward (why can’t Mirrors have keyholes, although really, how would that work?) until with the Blood-Pump chuck-chuck-chuckling at your loss of face, you swing the Key hard to smash the Mirror.

Fit of pique. Unbecoming. But it works, and the Veil shatters. Not the Mirror, just the Veil—you wielded the Key like a hammer, and the Veil between the worlds ruptures like an amniotic sac giving birth to . . . oh damn! The metaphors squirt between your fingers like goo spilling out through the no no no!

. . .

This didn’t used to happen: this mental meandering. It must be the Blood-Pump, always murmuring its distraction.

The birdbath Mirror shows stars—a night-full barely twinkling. (The Mirror is still intact; only the Veil was Sundered. But why do you keep having to reassure yourself?) The Mirror also shows the telescope’s second mirror: a small one held by a metal framework at the focal point of who cares. When you take the form of a Slave, you soak in the seep of their Collective Unconscious, with its monkey concern for what holds up what. Is a new Slave really worth . . . yes, it is.

Also the rush of novel experiences. Consider this an excursion. A getaway. The more the Blood-Pump pumps, the more you feel misgivings that your unpumped life was stale.

You wait.

Eventually you get off your knees and say, “Slave! Make a bench.” The Slave gets down on all fours. You sit on its back and keep waiting.

You’re jiggling a lower appendage. (Leg, it’s called a Leg.) You stop. A short time later, the Leg is jiggling again. Oh damn!

A face looks into the Mirror. It peers from high up above. (A platform has extended out from the side of the telescope’s cylinder.) The face belongs to a Slave and is therefore ill of beauty, but give some credit, it’s fresher than the old one. And it still possesses a soul. It may not be attractive but it’s interesting.

“Hey!” the face calls, “how the hell did you get in here?”

You reply, “You’re mistaken.” (Your voice is as comely as your features.) “I’m not in your world at all. You see me beyond the Veil.”

“What Veil?”

“The Veil between the worlds. I have opened a . . . ”

You slap the Slave on the rump. The Slave continues your sentence, so seamlessly no one could notice; it speaks in the same comely voice. Long ago, these first conversations amused you, oh admit it, you enjoyed the astonishment on the Slave-to-be’s face as you explained about portals between worlds. It’s real! It’s magic! There are more things in Heaven and but really, now the talk wearies you. Exposition is Slave’s work. Especially if the Slave-to-be quibbles about minutiae. “How does a Key open a Mirror?” Oh shut up shut up shut up.

(It’s their heritage from monkeys: always picking at nits. You want to feed this Slave its eyeballs, but in the early stages of Tempting, you must be seductive. You smile, charming and easeful, while the old Slave does the talking. The Slave knows what to say—it was rapt by its predecessor, who was rapt by the one before, and thus back through a chain of Slaves to some scarcely-remembered Time when you had enough ardor, yes ardor, to play the game yourself.)

The Slave-to-be takes the bait. It still harps about logic and Science, but it descends a ladder toward the stars that shine in the birdbath. The Slave-to-be says this is its job: it’s a student and has therefore been tasked with menial jobs, such as cleaning oh shut up, no wait, what? They clean the Mirror with a special type of snow? That’s more interesting than you expected. You imagine yourself dressed in cleansing sheets of snow, white and cold, there and there. Oh Stirrings, new Slave, get down here!

You rise to your feet, order the old Slave off its knees, that’s disgusting, a terrible first impression. Then you gesture with the Key in the difficult Fifth direction. A gale rises, a vortex spins. Your what’s-it-called hair flies free in the wind, which startles you for an instant, then feels wild and potent—like gusts in the Autumn Room, when trees discard their children and hiss with pleasure as their burden grows lighter. Dust stings the soft of your eyes, and the Slave-world’s air befouls yours with its stinks: burnt bridges, anxious cravings, and denial.

The smell offends you; you inhale it deeply. Self-congratulatory disdain.

But the portal closes. The vortex subsides. Your hair slumps tame, and there’s your Slave: not the wormy one, but the Slave-to-be. Its face is the color of amazement. You take its hand (this is one of the best parts) and bend to kiss its fingers.

You taste nothing. This isn’t that kind of kiss, nor the kind of body with taste buds in its lips, but the Blood-Pump doesn’t care. It flutters as if your mouth has filled with the sweet texture of flesh.

“Hello,” you say. “Be welcome, to this world and to my home.”

The Slave-to-be stares in wonder at the Palace’s luxury of glass. The hall isn’t totally Mirrors (that would be busy and gauche), so the glass also manifests as windows, skylights, floorlights, each in stained colors with light pouring through: images of the Palace’s lovers, and monsters slain, and pantheons bottled for display. The Palace is such a showoff when new Slaves arrive; next, it will shamelessly secrete the aroma of baking bread, or cinnamon, or sex, and it will pretend it’s trying to contribute, not upstage you or snigger at who you’ve brought home. Your face turns hot, and the next time the Palace receives a Special Guest of its own, you swear you’ll dissect a living child in the foyer.

Never mind. The Slave-to-be has asked a question. You didn’t catch it, but behind the new Slave’s back, the old Slave mouths, It inquires who you are.

“I’m your host,” you reply, most winsomely.

“Do you have a name?”

“No, I had that removed. Much safer, don’t you think? And as a plus, the process destroys your soul. You’ll find that convenient: souls are so conscience-y.”

The new Slave looks apprehensive. You could have honeyed up some lie, but why bother feigning that you’re nice? What is nice anyway? The one where you only eat things after they’re dead? Likely there’s more to it, because think, even if things are alive when you start chewing, they go dead by the time you swallow.

But maybe you should have been more discreet. Diplomatic. This Slave seems young for its kind (but not a child, you don’t take children, they’re never sincere) and perhaps it’s impressionable. The Slave must be overwhelmed at beholding you and the Palace, even if it pretends not. It affects a cool blue worldliness but sneaks little yellow peeks at the stained-glass windows, and bright fuchsia glances at your own comeliness (though it diverts its eyes most quickly when it sees you’ve noticed). It glances again and again oh it’s seen the Slave. The old one.

“What is that?”

“That’s the Slave,” you say. “It does Deeds.”

“What kind of Deeds?”

“Oh, conquests. Reprisals. Epic journeys to bring me gifts.”

“It’s falling apart,” the Slave-to-be says.

“So it is,” you agree. “I plan on replacing it.”

The Slave-to-be gives you a look, then steps back from you. “Is that why you brought me here? You need a new Slave?”

There’s no point in lying: lying has ceased to be one of your Patterns, although once, it felt more natural than telling the truth. Isn’t that curious? You sometimes panic that you’re incapable of Change. (That’s when you sleep in the Summer room.) But you’ve lost your Pattern of Deceit.

“I don’t need a new Slave,” you say, “but I want one. And here you are.”

“I won’t be your Slave.”

“That’s what you say. But things Change.” You gesture at the birdbath, no no it’s a Mirror, on which you stand. “If you wish to depart, just say the word. I’ll send you home, and that will be that. You’ll probably tell yourself this was only a dream. But you won’t believe it—you’ll know you passed up the chance to stop being drab. Still, the choice is yours.”

“And if I stay?”

You take the Slave-to-be’s hand: warm warm flesh, and solid. It’s always surprising how solid they are—you think of them as frail. “We’ll tour the Palace,” you say. “I’ll Tempt and Seduce you. In the end, you’ll be mine. Then, at my command, you’ll commit atrocities that leave you retching. You’ll reap great triumphs and crushing regrets. You’ll wield power beyond your dreams, and use it to become a thing that your current self would find sickening. But your life won’t be Small; you’ll have Purpose.”

You squeeze the Slave’s hand. You can feel the Slave’s Blood-Pump, thudding with the tingle no wait. That’s your pump and tingle. But the Slave-to-be doesn’t pull away, and its shoulder brushes yours, yes and oh.

The Slave-to-be says, “You’re trying to scare me. I won’t let you make me a monster, but I also won’t run home with my tail between my legs. I’d hate myself forever.”

In a gush, the Palace celebrates the Slave’s decision by sprouting flowers, cascading the walls with bougainvillea. The floor carpets itself in moss, and the ceiling drops down vines with purple trumpets so perfumed their scent makes you dizzy. (Not the bad-bewildered-sad kind of dizzy, the other one.)

Sometimes the Palace is a good roommate. You never said otherwise.

And Time takes on that Sense of Forever: of Summer afternoons and cool Spring mornings, of Winter nights by the fire and hushed Autumn twilights when the moment’s fragility makes it endless. Arm in arm, you lead the new Slave down a corridor of portals, where pastel-colored nymphs press their faces against the glass and hallucinatory fish swim through clouds of glowing plankton, where Heroes duel Villains on lightning-lashed heaths and bare mountain rocks just sit like craggy nothings well they can’t all be winners and the Palace has a thing for Geology. (You once stumbled across a room with slabs of profusely folded metamorphic stone hung on the walls with spikes. You hurriedly closed the door and slunk away.)

Now you stroll with the Slave-to-be: out of the Portal Wing, and on (this is all arm-in-arm, your arm and the Slave’s, you two are together) to the room of the Fifth season because of all the season rooms, it supplies the most captivating impact, and it’s also the cleanest, what with The Processes rendering the dead into sparkles. You can see the rendering at work—as you walk (arm-in-arm!) with the Slave-to-be, the old Slave shambles behind shedding bits of itself like dandruff. The bits turn to sparkles before they hit the floor, and it’s really quite, not enchanting, it’s actually rather repulsive, but in a pleasantly tinkly way.

“This room embodies the Fifth season,” you tell the Slave. “The season of thick thinning or thin thickening. One never knows till one’s in it.”

“What does that mean?”

“The thaw in the depths of Winter. The blizzard when you thought it was Spring. The surge of the desert, the failed monsoon, the solar storm, the meteor impact . . . ”

The Fifth Room is all of that. The room is the size of a hurricane, with a ceiling higher than the stratosphere and oceans deeper than tears. Dreaming children fly past on the backs of dragons, or with bath-towel capes, or crayoned cardboard wings, and once in a while, swarms of wasps catch a child unawares and sting it into a coma and lay eggs in the child’s intestines, but the wasps must be careful not to sting too much—if the child dies, then it all just explodes into sparkles: dead baby and larvae and all!

It’s magical.

You show the new Slave the wonders. A hundred variations on waterfalls: falling down, falling up, in silence, in song, falls flowing with honey instead of water, or lemonade, or the Souls of the Damned™, or champagne (and the bubbles pop crinkling in your nose). Oh and the castles, the caves, the jungle isles, the desert ruins, the minaret cities, the Valleys That Time Forgot, the Mines That Were Dug Too Deep, the Rivers Of Initiation, the Temples Of One-Note Gods. You walk the new Slave, arm-in-arm, whirlwinding. When you come to the bower, in the glade, by the brook, where orchids bloom and butterflies tremolo, you say, “Old Slave, prepare us a picnic.”

The old Slave says, “No.”

Oh.

You consider asking, “Why not?” but the answer won’t lead anywhere agreeable. Besides, the new Slave is watching: observing your management style vis-à-vis Slaves, so yes, it’s awkward. You adore this bower, you have languid salt-flavored memories, and they might even be of this Slave (the old one) although they probably aren’t. It’s hard to remember, or even think, and you want to remain arm-in-arm but this isn’t going to go away, is it?

“Slave,” you say to the old one (not the new), “what disgruntles you?”

“You intend to discard me. For this.” The old Slave points to the Slave-to-be.

“Not at all,” you say, which is true because in your mind you’ve already discarded the Slave. “Now prepare us a picnic.” An extraordinary word comes to mind. “Please.”

“No.”

The new Slave says, “It can’t be hard to make a picnic. We’ll do it ourselves. Where’s the food?”

“Far away,” you reply. You don’t even know where, not exactly. The Palace has a pantry, and a kitchen, and a garden orchard abattoir smokehouse . . . but those are in the Wing That Never Welcomes You. “This Slave could run there in the blink of an eye,” you say, “and return in an afterthought, but anyone else would take hours. Maybe years.”

The new Slave unwisely chuckles. “That makes me feel better. It shows there’s no point in enslaving me.”

You glare and pull your arm from the Slave-to-be’s grip.

“Don’t get mad,” the new Slave says, “but I can’t run anywhere in the blink of an eye.”

“You can once you’re empowered,” the old Slave says.

“What do you mean?”

“We’re special,” the old Slave says. “Human beings. From Earth. Unlike other worlds, Earth has no magic—none at all. We evolved without it, so we have no resistance.”

“Resistance?”

“Think of magic as a disease: strong and dangerous. By evolution, creatures from magical worlds develop resistance—the less you’re susceptible to magic, the more likely you are to survive an attack from some predator with magic powers. Over time, all species build up immunity to spells. But humans have never been exposed to magic . . . not in their lifetimes, nor in all the billions of years of life on Earth. So a boosting spell that makes a magic-born creature a little stronger, a little faster . . . with humans it makes us Superman. Or Wonder Woman.”

The new Slave looks aghast. “Are you saying you’re human? From Earth?”

The old Slave nods. The movement dislodges flakes of flesh. They fall as sparkles.

“What happened to you?” the Slave-to-be asks.

You answer before the Slave does. “It conducts itself carelessly. Healing spells could restore it to health; it has no resistance to any magic, so the tiniest curative charm could make it whole. But it won’t make the effort. It’s resigned.”

Is this a lie? You have no patience with that question. The truth is whatever demands the least effort to believe. The old Slave brought dissolution upon itself.

It stares at you without emotion: ruined eyes in a ruined face. Then it vanishes, leaving nothing but a clap of air . . . the sonic boom of its departure. The sound is tepid, like everything else associated with the Slave—the wormy old has-been could have left so fast the resulting thundercrash would have ruptured eardrums, but no, the Slave is too washed-up to make a statement.

Either that, or it didn’t want to injure the Slave-to-be. Even so, the boom echoes in the uncomfortable silence that follows.

The Slave-to-be blinks, then glances around, not seeming to understand what just happened. Realization finally comes and the Slave lowers its eyes, embarrassed for you.

“It doesn’t matter,” you say, “not at all, not at all.” You seize the arm of the Slave-to-be and pull it with you toward the exit. “This room no longer pleases me. It’s not wondrous, it’s just showy. We’ll go elsewhere.”

The Slave-to-be doesn’t comment. But after a few seconds, as the sky turns angry and the waterfalls catch fire, the Slave says, “Did it really just run away? As fast as the Flash?”

“It ran, or maybe it flew. But don’t be impressed.” You wave your hand dismissively. “I’m the one who enchanted it. I cast the spells to make it special. Otherwise it would be nothing.”

“You can really do magic?”

“Beyond your loftiest dreams. By the might of my sorcery, I have conquered the whole of the Cosmos twenty-three times.”

You hope that number sounds formidable. It’s what you always say . . . though truth to tell, you’ve lost count, and it’s been ages since your last campaign. You could conquer the place again as easily as snapping your fingers, but why bother, you’ve proved your point. Besides, more than twenty-three world conquests sounds needy. You’d rather just stay in the Palace where you have your Conveniences. Outside the walls, after twenty-three times of being beaten into submission, the Cosmos has become worn.

The Slave-to-be says, “When you talk about ‘all the Cosmos,’ you obviously don’t include Earth. It’s never been conquered—not the whole planet.”

“On the contrary,” you say, “your world bows under the weight of permanent defeat. Your kind became mine long ago when I subjugated your Protector. You have been my possessions ever since.”

The Slave laughs. “So, what, you’ve got an ownership certificate? You beat some Protector nobody’s ever heard of, and you think that puts you in charge?”

“I am in charge,” you say. You’re annoyed because the Slave looks at you how? Not in a good way. The word is “pity” isn’t it, or “pitying derision” and how has this happened, how did you get here?

You’re angry and you let it out, a little. You set aside a slice of your comeliness, just a sliver off your fingernail, no, not that much, the amount of nail that would be abraded by one of those rough things, what do you call them? Never mind, just concentrate, or you’ll open too much. You dispel that miniscule shaving of your Slave-race persona, so that the Truth pierces through like a spike.

The Slave-to-be freezes. It cannot move. You could do anything to it: anything, and it would let you. No, it would try to help, however it could. Eagerly. Single-mindedly.

But that’s not how this works. You raise the fingernail and bite off the part that’s gone radiantly black. When you’ve swallowed the infinitesimal morsel of your true self, the Slave unfreezes.

It shrieks, “What did you do?”

“Proved my point,” you answer. But strong-arm tactics shouldn’t have been needed. This is a Tempting, not a Crushing. You didn’t have to resort to brute force with the old Slave. (At least you don’t remember doing so. Did you? No, your memory is fine. You have always used Finesse and Guile.)

And there are Rules you have to follow, Rules and Patterns. You’re only You if you act like You. Otherwise, you’re a broken Thing just going through the motions.

“Let’s put this behind us,” you say. “Nothing happened, did it, really?” You reach for the Slave’s arm but it flinches away. You could force no, no, no, no! “We’ll go somewhere restful,” you say. You walk off toward the Spring Room.

The Slave doesn’t move. “What if I want to go home?”

“I will escort you back to the portal. But what has changed? Nothing. You learned a truth you don’t like, but it was true all along. If you run away in denial, it won’t alter the facts. Whereas if you stay, I shall give you power.”

“Like you gave to your Slave? The one who’s crumbling?”

“The one who runs faster than your eyes can see. Who has defeated vast armies singlehanded. Who converses with dragons, light-beams and ghosts, learning things no others of your kind have ever grasped. Your race can be ensorcelled to become greater than all other creatures in the Cosmos . . . and I can cast the spells to make it happen.”

The Slave mutters, “ ‘These things will I give you if you fall down and worship me.’”

You roll your eyes. How often have you had that quoted back at you? “I’m going to the Spring Room,” you say. “It’s pleasant. If you like, I’ll let you go flying—no strings attached.”

“Yeah, right,” the Slave-to-be says. But when you set off for Spring, it follows. Oh look, it is following, you haven’t ruined everything.

And in Spring, the Palace outdoes itself with the freshness of the air, the green smell of buds, and impatient little flowers racing up through thinning snow to beat the competition. Sometimes the Spring Room embodies late Spring when the trees have blossomed and baby ducks march beside rivers; sometimes it’s rainy Spring, washing down meadows and runneling ravines; sometimes it’s gusty, when trees toss, and whatever jacket you’re wearing is too thin. But today the Spring Room is The Day After Thaw, with the last crystals of ice still hiding in crevices, while violets! And crocuses! And those little blue ones that only last a day, the metaphor is shameless, but today is the day!

(Your Blood-Pump pounds like feet of a running army. Even when you aren’t embodied as a Slave, you’re vulnerable to emotion: as vulnerable as a Slave is to magic. Only the Palace and Time understand your sensitivity—others think you’re cold, unfeeling. But the Palace and Time understand . . . and perhaps old Slaves do too.)

The Spring Room makes even the Slave-to-be smile. The Slave breathes deeply, then darts a look at you. You decide the Slave is eager to dance but too shy to make the first move. (You’re the most comely being it’s ever met.) You grab its hands and swing it around (but gently, it’s breakable) and the Palace makes music while Time (which can do many things) expands or contracts from moment to moment to make the dance smoother. You appreciate the help: your Slave body is gawky. You jump (oh Stirrings!), you laugh (more Stirrings!), you leap as high as your legs will take you, then let go.

The Slave-to-be flies.

It spreads its arms like a cross in the sky. Every Slave, isn’t it interesting, adopts a distinctive posture for flying: some with arms and legs straight out, some with fists up like a boxer, some in the cross shape, and once there was a Slave who went feet first, very odd, and was that the same Slave who had the tattoos? They blend together after a while, because really, what does it matter if they hold themselves differently when they fly? They’re still hollow shells with no souls. Personal quirks and the semblance of selfhood are just vestigial.

But the Slave-to-be whoops with elation. It soars into the blue-line-black sky (blue on the left for Spring days, black on the right for Spring nights) and sends larks winging away. The Slave pursues them, but can’t catch up—your spell permits only low velocity, since you have not granted the Slave heightened reflexes or the resilience to survive high-speed collisions.

(Chagrined, you remember past Temptings. But you’ve learned, haven’t you, you aren’t senile.)

The Slave exalts with the Spring, crossing over into the night half where the Palace has chosen swamp—drowned trees and peeping frogs, mysterious splashes in the dark, and bats gorging on mosquitoes. (Oh, the bats are silent! How sad! Your slave ears must be deaf to bat-song.). And the stench of rot, which smells of the Cycle, which is the holiest scent in the world. The Slave flies above the mire, homing in on the bower (for there are bowers in every season) where look, the old Slave stands silent and alone.

The old Slave watches the new one soar, then turns to you.

It says nothing. Hollow shells don’t converse. You could order it to converse—charmingly witty—and it would do so, for the Slave has been enhanced in that way, as in all others: a golden tongue (though not literally) because many a Deed is accomplished more easily with charisma than with force. But you can’t remember commanding any Slave to chat. That would be too lonely to bear, and bowering with Slaves is empty enough already.

The old Slave watches and waits. You wonder if it remembers nights in this bower . . . that is, if it remembers the nights as anything more than events. Are they anything more for you? Oh yes, they were fantasies, no, Fantasy, the cleaner one: dreams of a life that isn’t ceilinged, and for mornings without withered husks being swept off the sheets.

The old Slave puts its hand against your cheek. You allow it.

Then the Slave lifts its other hand, and both encircle your throat. A last embrace.

Oh wait, you remember now, this body has needs, not merely response. The body doesn’t just enjoy inhaling, it requires the intake of air, and this squeezing you gag it hurts.

You find yourself struggling (how barbaric!) but the Slave is far too strong. It could snap your neck in an instant, but that’s not its ambition. (Spring is ambition.) The old Slave begins to glow, like when it pretends it’s an angel.

The new Slave drives feet first onto the old one. The move is notionally heroic but has no effect; the old Slave is tougher than mountains. The new Slave bounces off, landing asprawl at your feet.

Choking, in pain, you extend your hand to the Slave-to-be. The old Slave’s grip makes it impossible for you to meet eyes with the new Slave, but you imagine it looking hesitant, knowing the moment is pivotal. “I’ll help you,” it says, “but I won’t be your Slave.”

It takes your hand.

Magic happens. Lesser beings must gesture or chant, but not you, not for millennia. Magic happens whenever you wish, and your spells are as strong as Desire. Time stops for just a second (never mind the absurdity), and energy flows, drawn from the Spring that surrounds you into the new Slave’s very essence.

Strengthspeedintelligence. Hardinessvigorperception.

All around, the Spring swamp collapses, drained of life-force, reduced to slop. Even the stars are devitalized, and the night’s blackness thins to gray. It will be months before Spring can return again, but the new Slave rises, now as comely as yourself. It wrenches the old Slave’s hands from your neck, and hurls the decrepit monster away.

The old Slave flees. The new Slave pursues.

You remain where you are, feeling your Blood-Pump pound. Your neck is in agony. There’s not enough energy left in your surroundings to erase your injuries: self-healing requires inordinate power, even when you’re in a pliant Slave body. Just as Slaves have the least magic resistance of any organisms in the Cosmos, you have the most. You’re nearly immutable, so calcified by Patterns that the strongest enchantments barely scratch your patina. Yet damn how can you stand doing nothing?

Trying to stop your fingers from touching your tenderized throat, you slog through the lifeless swamp and out of the room.

The old Slave has undoubtedly fled into Winter. That’s the proper place for endings; also successions.

When you get to the Winter Room, you see that the Palace has decked it out well: not with a blizzard’s blinding crudity, or the blankness of an Arctic waste, but with the sterility of a moon circling a lifeless ice-giant, all bands and rings and gravity. A real moon would likely be airless, but the Palace has been considerate—this moon is desolate, but with breathable air in sufficient quantity to sustain you. You summon attractive clothing (white ermine, dashingly tailored), then proceed to the central bower, which is the only place this can end.

The bower lies in a crater, a diamond crater: not shaped like a diamond, but embedded with glinting jewels forged by the smash of a meteor impact. (You suspect there are more diamonds in the crater walls than a real impact produces, and also much larger crystals, most of which are exquisitely cut . . . but the Palace disdains shabby set-dressing. This is the final act; the stage should be memorable. This is also a chance for the Palace to indulge in Geology, but let’s not go there.)

The bower resides at the crater’s center, laid out on a thick bed of diamonds. The stones’ inner fire reflects ice-giant light: banded pastels and explosions as the Slaves battle midair. The Slaves move so fast they’re barely visible. What you see is blue luminescence, what’s it called, the eerie one when photons get dizzy. You imagine the Slaves throwing punches and grappling in aerial combat, but who knows, the new Slave was a student not a warrior, and the old Slave may be too rotted for fisticuffs. The brawl may be a slapfight, or biting, or schoolyard shoves, or it doesn’t matter, they’re still two blue burning nimbuses with an ice-giant as their background.

This is how it must end, the Climax of the Tale. There must be a Battle, a Victor and Loser, and oh, could there be swords? You conjure swords, one bladed with black, the other as burnished as a telescope Mirror, and you send the weapons sailing toward the combatants. The nimbuses seize the swords and swing at each other simultaneously—metal ringing on metal a hundred times a second so that the sound is like silverware dumped on the floor. But swords: much better than slaps, and if the Slaves don’t actually know how to fence, why should that matter? Rules and Patterns, submission thereto, fits the Key in a Lock, not a Mirror.

Wait, what does that mean? Go back.

Rules and Patterns, submission thereto. They don’t have to make sense, they simply have to be.

Another explosion. Dust showers down like snow, dust falling on the moon. Each mote has the scent of old Slave, all loyalty and neglect. The Slave had no choice but to serve you, a shell with its soul hollowed out, and yet (it’s the oddest thought) you wonder if it chose to make all this happen.

Because it.

As if it.

Twenty-three times you’ve conquered everything. No gods survive to block your will. Yet you’re still trying to fit Keys into goddamned Mirrors.

Why can’t you make this work?

The Slave-to-be alights heavily at the bower’s edge. It bleeds from innumerable cuts (the swords you conjured were puissant weapons, enough to wound planets) and you don’t know why the Slaves did any of this, not the old one or the new. With so many gashes, this freshly-minted Slave looks as ill-used as the old one; maybe it is the old one, who can tell, they blend together even when you’re trying very hard to keep things clear. But you go to the Slave, take it in your arms, and it doesn’t resist. It holds you too and its injuries heal. The two of you kiss on this white Winter moon.

(This is the true ending. Not the fight. It’s never the fight.)

Now comes oblivion. The Escape. From everything you can’t make work.

Sometime later, the ending ends. Sometime after that, the Slave says, “This was a set-up, wasn’t it?”

“How do you mean?”

“Between you and your Slave. It pretended to act rebellious, as if it was jealous of me. It faked trying to kill you, so I’d come to your rescue. You manipulated me so that in the heat of the moment, I’d accept superpowers. You hope I’ll like them so much, I’ll agree to be your Slave.” The Slave gives you a look of contempt. “But there’s something you didn’t count on: my brain became super too. I see through your scheme as clear as glass.”

You stare back in surprise. Was that really your plan? It sounds plausible: you don’t lie but you do Deceive, that is surely one of your Patterns. Using a victim’s noblest instincts to lure it into temptation . . . isn’t that how you’re said to operate?

You aren’t sure what you intended. The Blood-Pump has its own agendas, that your mind doesn’t oh how, how did this happen? Once, you were the morning-star; now you’re Dimmed. You still burn but no longer shine.

Perhaps the old Slave hatched a plan. To provide you with a new, oh, protectorcompanionnurse, when the old Slave had reached the limits of cohesion. Or maybe so the old Slave could blaze out in glory rather than just fall apart. You didn’t think a shell could have such feelings, but.

“I won’t do it,” the new Slave says. “Won’t be your mindless tool. I’m going home.”

It vanishes. It’s back in five seconds. “The portal’s shut.”

“It needs my Key.”

The Key hangs around your neck. You feel it resting against your skin. You wonder if the Slave will snatch the Key and run, but the Slave only says, “Then go. Let me out of here.”

You slowly walk back from the moon to the portal. The journey is numb; the Slave loiters briefly at your side until the silence between the two of you becomes unbearable. It flees. Several times as you plod on, the Slave reappears in the distance (a dog impatient for its master to hurry) but you’re mostly alone. The Palace remains unobtrusive, with tactful corridors—not totally empty (that would be too bleak) but not much decorated either. Subdued lighting, faint music, and long banks of windows looking out on sunset seascapes. Views down from headlands . . . that sort of thing.

Time helps too, shrinking short so that the walk goes more quickly, but not so fast that you don’t have Time to pull yourself together. You manage to make your face neutral as you reach the telescope Mirror.

It looks nothing like a birdbath. Inner flatness has made your eyes clear.

The Slave is waiting. “When I go back,” it says, “I assume my superpowers go away?”

“Yes,” you reply. “Magic can’t survive in your world.”

“Why?”

“I don’t feel like telling you.” It’s petty, you hate when you’re petty, but you can’t help it. “You’ll regret going back,” you say. “You’ll miss the power you once had.”

“Do you think I don’t know that? It will eat me up inside . . . thinking of what might have been.”

“Then stay.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Angry. Hard. “On the outside, you’re so gorgeous I can’t take my eyes off you. On the inside, I don’t know if you’re damaged and lost, or just faking it to make me feel sorry for you. Doesn’t matter. If there’s one thing I know, you don’t make deals with the devil.”

The Slave, no, not the Slave, the Slave-Like Thing that is going Away, motions toward the Key around your neck. You hesitate; even now, you could simply order the Slave-Like Thing to obey. It couldn’t defy you—you’ve conquered the Cosmos (twenty-three times!) and nothing can resist your wishlongingache. But that would be a breach of your self-constructed Patterns. If you let those go, there’d be nothing left of you.

You take the Key and tap the Mirror. The portal opens with a sigh.

The Thing that’s not a Slave says, “Isn’t it kind of weird to use a Key on a Mirror?”

“I KNOW!” You clench your fist. A wind like the Shout of Creation blows the insolent Thing back to where it belongs, or at least to where it’s chosen to be, good riddance, leave and be damned, damn, it’s gone.

You sit down leadenly. The Palace spawns a bench fast enough that you don’t end up on the floor.

How can things have ended this way? How can they not have worked out in triumph? They always used to. You could always just start—no need for planning—just the choice to do, and the force of your mind, your shine, your brilliance would make it happen. Now everything is in pieces and you can’t make them fit.

You do not cry. If you wept, what would Time and the Palace think? You feel them watching. Laughing at your failure? Or perhaps, like discomfited roommates everywhere, they just want to restore the facade that nothing is wrong.

They may even want to make things better. You remember once when the Palace was slamming its doors over and over for no reason, and you wanted to help but didn’t know how. Eventually, you conquered the Cosmos in the Palace’s name (that was Conquest Fifteen) and whether or not that lightened the Palace’s mood, you think it appreciated the gesture.

Too bad the Palace can’t talk. And Time is even more inscrutable. Still, their hearts are in the right place.

Oh, right. Heart. That’s the word.

The Palace attempts to cheer you with kittens and other delicacies. Time tries to Heal All Things (you can feel the effort) but you sit by yourself, alone on the bench, and nothing Changes at all. In the Mirror, the heavens flash by; the sun arcs like a cannonball that one horizon shoots at the other; stars streak, galaxies wheel, clusters separate (bewildered at how it happened), and the white noise of Entropy hisses words that aren’t really there.

Shut up, shut up, shut up.

Abruptly, Time stops racing. The birdbath Mirror lights up, as if a dusty curtain has been drawn back to let the sun into a darkened room. Day. A Slave-Like Thing climbs down the ladder inside the telescope.

All Slaves look alike. You can tell them apart if they stand side by side, but otherwise it’s hard, and it makes you feel stupid. This one peers into the Mirror. “Are you there?”

It can’t see you. Time has healed the rupture in the Veil. The Not-Slave Thing can only be seeing its own reflection and the cloudless blue sky at its back.

“It’s been years,” it says. “I’ve done well. Trying to lose myself in my work. But . . . ”

It looks back over its shoulder at the cloudless blue sky. “This telescope is in the mountains. I go out hiking sometimes. Today, I was standing on this stretch of bare mountain rock . . . and all of a sudden, Time stood still. Really. Nothing moving except the beat of my heart.” The Not-Slave pauses, then looks embarrassed. “I can’t describe it—not well enough—because in the mountains, aren’t there always moments that take your breath away? Just moments of pure primal awe.

“But this was more. Like being in the presence of . . . I don’t know, I don’t have the words. As if Time and the mountains were inside my head, and they were telling me . . . reminding me . . . of magic and freedom and wonder and no limits and fantasy and dreaming and you. You.”

You touch your chest. You feel your heart. You feel . . . no. You just feel.

“Despite all the good reasons why this is a bad idea,” the Not-Slave says, “and the craziness of acting like a kid full of hormones . . . shallow wish-fulfillment, phrases like that have been rolling around in my brain since the moment ended and I headed back here . . . I know it’s childish, but I want the magic. And the mountains say you need me—someone the magic still works on. Someone who’ll be with you, so that sometimes you’ll remember.”

You find that you’re standing, the Key in your hand.

“Take me back,” the Not-Slave says. “We’ll work something out.”

You kneel with the Key. You tap. A portal opens. No gales, just opening. The Not-Slave returns to your world.

It says, “But I won’t be your Slave.”

You have, what’s it called, déjà vu. Perhaps the old Slave never submitted either. And perhaps that old Slave wasn’t the first; perhaps you have a Pattern, a Pattern of Need, and the Palace and Time aren’t your only roommates. There’s always a Slave, no, a Companion, and the three try to make your eternity comfortable, because but you don’t know why.

A day will come when you forget what the Companion is, and you’ll call it “Slave.” It will correct you the first time and the second, but not the hundredth, and when it is falling to pieces, it will softly remind you of that moment in Summer when a breeze finds its way through the curtains. You will spend the night in the Summer Room and in the morning in the morning in the morning upon waking in a dampened bed.

Thus you will live, not unhappily, ever after.

James Alan Gardner got his Master’s in Math with a thesis about black holes, then immediately gave up academics for writing. He’s published eight novels and numerous short stories, both science fiction and fantasy. His works have won the Aurora Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the Asimov’s Readers’ Choice Award. He’s a two-time finalist for both the Hugo and Nebula awards. He lives in southern Ontario where he dabbles in kung fu and geology.

Continue reading »]]> You sneak in the night, red string around
stalactites and stalagmites. At your feet,
the river caresses you, waves and currents
still visible among the colder patches.
You photograph—blood in tears,
scratches on purity—playing in light,
and darkness; life,
and decay;

lacerations
in the ice,
where it was.

Stefanie Maclin’s poetry and short stories have appeared in such publications as Illumen, Dreams & Nightmares, Battered Suitcase, and Conversation Poetry Quarterly. When she is not writing, she works as a librarian. She lives in Boston’s MA. For a complete listing of her writing credits, please visit http://thesilentpoet.live journal.com.

Continue reading »]]> When he meets his new lab partner for the first time, he tries not to look directly at her. Snatched glimpses prove she’s pretty, but his account is by necessity piecemeal, a view as if through compound eyes. For instance, her brows arch like the raptorial legs of a mantis and are brown like her hair, which is wavy and curls around her chin, which has a small mole on it like a black garden ant that’s lost its colony.

“Hello,” she says. “My name’s Kendra. Do you care which desk I use?”

He does care. “No, nope, up to you,” he mutters. He doesn’t want to scare her off when she’s only just appeared.

“Okay then,” she says, hefting a backpack full of supplies on top of the not his desk—a lucky guess—then pulls out a tissue-pack and commences dusting off her new digs, exactly as he had. He can feel himself grinning, catches himself, flits his gaze to the tiled floor.

“What’s your name?”

“Phil.”

“As in philodendron, nice. I own a heart-leaf one that attracts wicked fungus gnats.” She flicks a dusty tissue into the waste bin. “So, tell me about you. What do you do for fun?”

He doesn’t do anything for fun, really, besides reading science-fiction novels and mountain biking and the occasional restaurant review written for the local paper, oh and he also takes care of his parents’ rose garden, though they’re getting on in years—his parents and the roses—his father recently suffered a mild stroke, and . . . His past hopes and current research interests spill out of him, pitched to a mumble. She might’ve given away her life story right then, if only he’d been braver, dared to test out her methods, asked ever so casually what she did for fun. Instead, he folds his awkwardness around him like a pair of flightless wings and hunches over a microscope to hide his blush.

For a year they work alongside one another in silence, until, over a tray of Halyomorpha halys, he finally chirps out other words, these ones rehearsed for months: “Might you want to grab some dinner?”

“I thought you’d never ask. But I actually have plans tonight,” she says, smiling to take the sting away. “Open ballroom; I go every week. Hey, you should come with me. We love new people.”

She slicks off her lab coat and throws it over a chair. Beneath, she’s wearing a fancy dress of some glossy, dark green material he doesn’t recognize. He’d spent so long planning his words, he hadn’t even considered his wardrobe; his baggy jeans reek of stinkbug.

“Don’t mind me; there’s no dress code,” she promises him. “I just like playing the part every now and again.” She clasps a choker of interlocked grasshoppers about her neck.

He takes the free intro lesson with her, but he’s lousy at it; afterward, she dances with everyone but him while he clings to the back wall, trying to camouflage himself. He’d wanted to talk to her—hopefully kiss her—but nothing he’d rehearsed had prepared him for this particular set of humiliations. Finally she begs off a tall man in tails who’s monopolized her much of the evening in order to make her way over to him.

“Sorry about that! Ira’s a pest. May I have this dance?” A waltz drifts over the speakers and Phil spins her around the floor. He can only execute a few basic steps, but he’s surprised to find himself leading her into graceful turns and promenades; with her in his arms, he’s a much better dancer than he’d realized.

He’s staring half-focused at her long neck as it arches away from him when one of the grasshoppers at her throat flexes a slender tibia, gathers itself, and leaps onto his exposed arm. He stiffens but keeps shuffling in time with the rise and fall of the music. Then the other five insects stir, antennae twitching, and begin to crawl along her skin, or spring upward to coil in her hair.

“Kendra?”

She presses closer. Beneath his hand, the one caressing her shoulder, his palm rests on a crush of insect bodies. The shimmering fabric of her dress is the linked carapaces of thousands of grasshoppers come to life, preening, parading, a few jumping drunkenly from her skirt to his sleeve, down to his jeans and escape. How had he not noticed sooner? Order Caelifera, mandibles for tearing, wings for flight. Those that change color and travel in sky-obliterating clouds bear the common name of locust and devour crops, grassland, everything, leaving desolation in their wake. The song winds down, and she gathers up the insectile folds of her gown to curtsey. He bows in return, awkwardly, the unfamiliar gesture discomfiting; a small rain of displaced hoppers patters to the floor.

“That was the last song,” she says. “Now they kick us out.” As he walks her to her car, he can see right through her dress, grasshoppers leaping desperately like they want to get away from one another, or her, or him. She offers him a sweet smile that conceals more than it exposes; she seems oblivious to her living gown, to how much of herself she’s revealed.

At work it’s like the date never happened; she’s even more distant. He can’t think of a single question that wouldn’t make him seem like a jerk. Did your dress turn to bugs, or was it just me? Are grasshoppers your area of expertise? Why did you invite me along if you didn’t plan on dancing with only me?

One evening, weeks later, she asks to leave work early. “I can cover for you,” he says immediately, then regrets it, sure he’s come off as overeager. “Why?”

“Blind date. I’m dreading it.” She’s donned a slinky red dress, a single scorpion dangling from a chain around her neck.

“Give me another chance,” he blurts out. “Let me pick the place this time. No one will notice if we close the lab early.”

She looks askance. “I’ll have to text and cancel. It’s a little last minute . . . ”

He’s not sure what changes her mind, but he’s ecstatic when she hops into his car. He takes her for Italian, manicotti and merlot, a place he gave four-and-a-half stars to a few months back. Her scorpion pendant catches light; he asks about it.

“My last boyfriend, he was very into pain. I miss it sometimes, although I don’t miss him.” She twirls her wineglass and changes subjects, but it’s the most he’s gotten from her yet.

They go back to his place and it’s just as he’d imagined it would be. At first her mouth is pliant beneath his, and then a fierce tingling numbs the tip of his tongue. He jerks away, and a tiny scorpion flees from between her parted lips, Centruroides sculpturatus, poisonous enough to kill. The dress, when he slides it off her shoulders and to the floor, scatters, sending dark bodies skittering toward darkened corners and beneath furniture. All over his body stinging points of pain bloom where she’s touched him.

They drive to the laboratory separately the next morning. As they work side by side, a familiar silence flutters between them.

“I—” he tries, but the words are a thousand claws scrabbling in his throat. She’s collating files at her desk; he imagines her inattention is deliberate and shoves specimens to the back of the freezer with increasing ferocity. Lucky insects. These would expire in their sleep as the cold claimed them. No more worries about flight, escape, finding a mate. Whatever’s wrong with him—whatever pheromone he fails to send out, whatever marking he doesn’t possess—she won’t tell him, but he knows when to take a hint.

They never discuss the scorpions, just keep on keeping on, each day arriving to work at the same time, collecting data together peaceably enough. Until the morning he arrives at the lab to find her in tears over an overdue report. She’s wearing a black mourning dress, and tucked into the curls of her hair, a veil of finest spiderweb. Her father passed away the night before, unexpectedly. Phil measures his response, gathers each word to him, pinning them in his mind so none can escape. “I know there’s nothing I can do, but I’d like to go with you. If I can be a help.”

The entire life cycle of a mayfly passes before she answers. “Sure,” she says. “I’d like that.”

At the funeral he meets her remaining family—a brother, two aunts. Kendra doesn’t say much, just leans on his arm, perched delicate as a butterfly. When he asks how she’s holding up, she snorts.

“Aunt Joan’s a wreck; Johnny’s taking her home.” Phil notes that she hasn’t answered his question, but doesn’t press her. Mourners drift toward the parking lot until at last it’s him and Kendra surrounded by dead things, same as usual. He’s unwilling to leave her alone.

“I have an hypothesis about your dress,” he says. “Do you mind if I test it?”

Her eyes dart warily to her gown, thousands of miniature spiders that have latticed her in web, a cocoon to protect her from harm. He can’t place the species, no way to tell if they’re venomous. “Be my guest,” she says.

He takes her hand, sets it against his shoulder, and she falls into position as naturally as a grasshopper settles its wings. Slowly he dances her around the graveyard, waiting for the taxonomy of words to organize themselves in his mind: order, family, genus, species. Her tears wet through the fabric of his jacket like there’s nothing there.

“When did you learn how to dance?” she asks, not lifting her head from his shoulder.

“I took some lessons.”

“Why?”

“I thought I could understand you better.”

“That was your hypothesis?” She pulls away, narrowing one eye; he wonders if he’s offended her, if she thinks he learned dance as an attempt to capture her or manipulate her.

“Not quite. See, when I first started out studying insects,” he begins, “I went on a research trip upstate. We were out at night with headlamps, nocturnal beetling, and I netted a Nicophorus americanus.”

She starts in his arms. “The most recent known sighting was in, what, the fifties?”

“It had the right markings, anyway. Six scalloped red spots.”

“What did you do?”

He leads her into a turn so that he doesn’t have to see her expression. “I let it go.”

“What? Why?”

“I don’t know. I wanted it to find another of its kind.” He spins her back in to him. “Didn’t want it to spend its life in a case. Which I guess makes me a lousy entomologist.”

His sleeves, jacket, and pants dissolve into tiger-striped beetles, the click of chitinous legs and unfurled wings rustling in the dark.

“Nicrophorus investigator.” She smiles. “Burying beetles. Family Silphidae, same as your rarity.” One alights on her hand; the rest flit away, and he’s left naked in her arms.

Brooke Wonders’ fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Daily Science Fiction, and Monkeybicycle, among others. She is a graduate of Clarion 2011 and a current PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She blogs at girlwonders.com.

Continue reading »]]> The boats have stopped coming. After three long weeks without a single boat, I have stopped looking to the sea. The last rowboat that came rests belly up farther down the shore. It reminds me of a beached whale; a calf at that, dead before it ever really began. A woman sits there at sunset each day, waiting for a sailor who will never return.

The train still comes, bless the train. Every day at 1:10 p.m. it shimmers into being in the wheat field, but discharges fewer and fewer people each time. Pretty soon, no one will come and my keeping will be for naught.

I get to the field as morning light begins to pierce the stalks of wheat. Only their tips glow; the rest crouch in dark shadow. The field appears empty at first, but against the twin silhouettes of the grain silos I see Bernard and his companion, hunkered down at their debris-strewn table.

The scent of their cigar smoke reaches me even before I cross over to them. Bernard raises a worn hand, not to welcome me, but to shush me, even though I already know not to speak to him. His shoulders bunch under his olive green coat, hair all but invisible under his black beret.

“They haven’t ordered it yet,” he says, pressing the headset against his ear. “Any moment now—any moment.”

He’s waiting for the go ahead to strike Sicily; every day he listens to his worn out radio and its distant signal. I don’t know his companion’s name—he never speaks. I never ask. I glimpse the battered top hat on the table and pick it up before Bernard can begin to complain about it. I smile at the men and leave them to their work. I have my own work, after all.

#

A peek at my pocket watch tells me the train is due soon. The wheat seems to know this; it bends under the wind, twin tracks visible if one knows where to look. The wheat remembers the train’s place, even when the train is elsewhere. Elsewhen.

My work now is simple. I fold the top hat into my pocket for later consideration and I pluck the sticks that lay strewn in the field where they have lain since dropped. Nineteen in all. There used to be so many more. I tie them into a bundle and hoist it onto my back. So light, when once the burden was so great. Tonight, I will burn the sticks into nothingness and release the people who brought them.

There is a flicker against the gold and gray horizon; a girl in a cream dress, violin near her chin. She is an impossible thing—she should not be here, for I burned her stick. But, then again, Bernard also lingers. Why?

The girl’s sweet music flows across the brightening grain and is then abruptly gone. The girl vanishes after an explosion of B flats, and I look down at my pocket watch. 1:10 p.m.

I step back from the bent wheat, awaiting the appearance of the train, the hard up rush of air when the rusted engine appears. The engine will smell of the places it has been—sometimes of curry, often of oil. Once, it smelled like cherry blossoms. The trees in this land do not bloom, nor do they sport leaves. Not any more.

The gears of my watch turn. Another full sweep of the second hand. And another. 1:12 p.m. and the train has not come. I close a hand into a fist around my watch and wait. I close my eyes and count and when I open my eyes, the field remains empty.

The wheat rises in the growing light; it has given up its wait.

#

Time is strange in this place; morning comes after noon, and evening can be found around any corner. I crouch in the wheat and await the train and it does not come. When I finally turn my back on the field, I hear a phantom whistle, but know it as only a cruel trick. I go to Grandmother’s china closet, which rises tall out of the wheat. I turn its sharp corner and step into pitch darkness.

The first time a boat did not come, there was nothing to be done. So it is with the train. Will it come tomorrow? I absently stroke my watch in my pocket; tomorrow will be here soon enough.

I lay the nineteen sticks in a row, balanced against the back of the china closet. Nineteen people yesterday. None today. There will be no sticks to gather in the morning. I set each stick against the back of the china closet and lift the lighter Bernard gifted me with. I flick the flame into life, but cannot bear to burn the sticks to ash as I must. What if they are the last?

I can hear Bernard in the darkness, speaking into his radio. His accent is not fully of one place. He lingers somewhere in between just as everything here does.

I snap the lighter shut. I close its warm shape into my palm.

I take the top hat out of my pocket. It is on Bernard’s table every morning. No matter where I leave it, no matter if even I burn it. It returns.

Some things come back. I lean against the china closet, refusing to look at the dark and empty field. What is the difference between hope and prayer? I do not know the answer as I bow my head low.

#

Overnight, the top hat vanishes. I wake to the scent of the sea and know that something is wrong. Something beyond the lack of train. I can feel it inside me, a darkness I don’t know how to court.

I rise from the wheat and eye the nineteen sticks still propped against the back of the china closet. I gather and tie them again, strapping them to my back. Bernard’s voice is low, but still present over the whispering wheat. His orders have not yet come in; he will not move on. “Damn hat,” he mutters and throws it across the wheat.

Over the scent of salt and water, I pick out something new, and turning to look, I see him standing there. A man, illuminated by the rising sun. The sun throws his shadow long and tall across the wheat. I straighten. His eyes meet mine. He looked the same way a thousand years ago, didn’t he? Standing in a forest with shafts of sunlight framing him.

The sun moves, the light shifts, and I see that he is not a man at all. He cannot be the one I remember. It is a wolf. He—for it seems male—stands on hind legs, paws held loosely together at his waist as one would hands.

“I forgot to tell you,” he says.

I watch him at the edge of the field, the pink and orange sunlight glinting on the sea to his back. Where has he come from? The train has not yet arrived. I have but nineteen sticks and all those people are accounted for.

“Who are you?” I ask.

“I love you,” he says.

And when I blink, he vanishes, as though he was never there. But I smell him on the air and somehow, the scent is familiar.

I pace back towards Bernard and his companion. I pluck the top hat from the wheat and bring it with me. For the first time, I join them at the table. There are only two chairs, so I perch on the edge. Bernard doesn’t like this at all.

His face screws up into a frown and he’s about to object when his head snaps to the right. The radio crackles with static and his eyes brighten, and just when it seems he’ll get his orders and march away from this place, the radio erupts with a belch of gray smoke.

“Woman, you bring misery,” he says. “Then and now, wherever I see you—and I always see you.” He pats his jacket pocket, a small photograph hidden away there; it is a woman with a coil of long brown hair, and while mine is white, Bernard tells me this woman is me.

“You need to burn those sticks,” he says.

The weight of the sticks against my back is a comfort, the one thing I understand. “But what if they are the last?” I finally ask.

Bernard’s companion nods, opening his mouth to say, “Then it is even more important you carry it through.” He will never say another word here.

The companion withdraws a stick from beneath the table, and Bernard adds one as well. Did I not already burn these?

“Time to burn us too, lass. Sicily won’t come for me now.” He runs a hand across the top of the radio, stirring soot and dust. I see where these things have settled into the lines of his skin and I wonder if this is what holds Bernard together.

I reach across the table and take the two sticks in hand. I add them to my bundle, a solid twenty-one now, but still don’t want to burn them. A rustling in the wheat behind me causes me to turn. It is the girl with the violin. It is not a bow she drags across the strings, but a stick. She hands it to me.

In the wheat all around us I see the other nineteen; figures trapped between this world and that. Grandmother bid me to do the work. What if it is the last? What if the train will never come again?

“They come for the burning,” the wolf whispers, though I do not see him. “Finish your work.”

I clutch the girl’s stick—twenty-two—and do not move.

#

I refuse to burn them. I walk through the ghostly forms that come and go from the field, and memorize their faces. More than one of them looks like Grandmother from a certain angle.

“Misery,” Bernard whispers to me, an almost angry edge to his voice. “They don’t belong here, woman.”

I know he’s right—this field was never meant to be their final destination. But aren’t they happy here, between the grain and the sky? With the salt sea at their feet? Grapes for dinner and dreams made of dragonfly wings? I have lived with such for so long, how could they not wish it?

I keep the sticks and reject turning them to ash. If they are the last people I will ever know, I cannot release them.

The train returns that evening—though not under its own power. The wolf pulls the train into the field, a heavily rusted chain attached to the cow catcher. The wheat does not bend to welcome the train; it breaks and splinters.

The wolf collapses to the ground, dropping the chain; the entire world seems to shift under its weight. The girl and her violin flee into the night behind Grandmother’s china closet.

Steam curls from the train. It brings the new scents of sulfur and deepest dirt. There is no conductor—there never is. Where the conductor would sit is occupied by one figure alone, a man who seems too young for this place—but in my time I have seen even the smallest child here. Everyone comes when they must, no matter their age.

He pokes his head out of the train and focuses on me. “Have you found my hat then?”

I unroll the tattered top hat from my pocket. “This hat?”

He grins and dragonflies escape from his longcoat as he steps down. Their golden wings beat down the scent of sulfur as they flutter up and up and up. “I say, that hat. May I?” He extends a hand to me. In the hand, he holds a stick.

We exchange hat for stick. He balances the hat on his head, a perfect fit.

“Good day, miss,” he says and wanders off into the wheat, not fully visible, but neither fully gone.

The wolf looks up at me, wheat crackling around him. “If it is the end, you must accept it. And if not the end, you must take what few do come in their own time.”

I watch the wheat begin to burn under the heat of the train; sulfur coats each strand, spreading from the train and outward. How soon before it devours my field? Would I give up these souls to save it? There’s no questioning that. I nod at the wolf and head toward Grandmother’s china closet.

#

I settle the sticks into the car frame that rusts in the wheat some distance from the train. Twenty-three sticks this time. Some are long and some are short. Each is a life that has come to this place. Each is a life that I have been charged to pass along. These lives do not stay in this place for long; everyone comes and everyone goes. Everyone except me.

Grandmother told me this when I was a child. We never really leave this place, she said, but these other souls must pass on. They come to us with an offering; we take this and turn it to ash; we scatter them into the far away, where they shall become the wind that carries another, the dragonfly that perches, the smallest grain of wheat that waits for sunlight and rain.

This time, I place the lighter against the sticks and allow them to burn. They caught beautiful fire and the car turned so hot I could not touch it for long, but still I touched it and did not burn. The wolf crouched beside me, watching.

Bernard cried out, “The call! I’ve got the call!” a moment before he turned to spark and blew into the night sky; his companion followed, and so too the girl with her violin. The man in his top hat, the woman who awaited her sailor.

When the wolf hands me his stick, I close my hands around the long length of wood and look at him, his eyes golden in the firelight. A thousand years ago, before there was a Bernard, before Grandmother called me to the far away, there was him, by my side. We hunted the sunlit woods and ate birds crisped over open fires.

“You are never alone here,” he says as I slip his stick into the fire.

I nod and watch him fade into the stars as his stick burns. As the fire dwindles, it grows ever quiet around me. A dragonfly alights on my shoulder; I hear its wings for a moment and then nothing.

I watch the fire until it becomes ash, then rise and walk to the train. The sulfur evaporates from the wheat as I pass; the wheat is crushed, but even now I see it stirring back to life. I touch the side of the train, metallic and warm. Humming.

“I expect you back at one-ten,” I say and it flickers away. I hear its whistle like a “yes” in the air around me. I look toward the sea as the first stars begin to prick the sky and my breath catches at a shadow upon the water.

It is the coming of a boat.

E. Catherine Tobler was born on the other side of the International Dateline, which either gives her an extra day in her life or an extraordinary affinity when it comes to inter-dimensional gateways. Her fiction can be found in Clarkesworld Magazine, LCRW, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Her debut novel arrives this summer from Masque Books.

Continue reading »]]> When I was a child I wanted to be a Tyrannosaurus rex when I grew up. Apparently I had big aspirations. In the interest of full disclosure, I also wanted to be a mailbox, so it’s not like I was any cooler as a child than I am as an adult. While neither of those wishes came true they continue to be a source of humor for my family to this day. I think of those choices often when my son declares that he wants to be a ninja or an elephant.

I think most of us fail at achieving our preschool growing-up ambitions with potentially the exception being people who become professional athletes since many athletes start honing their craft at a young age. Even those of us who want to be a fireman or a doctor or a teacher as a child often have the complexity of life throw different curves in our path which lead us somewhere else.

On the same token, I think the reality of my adulthood profession is potentially more fanciful and inconceivable to my preschool brain than the idea of becoming a dinosaur. And I don’t even mean the specificity of what I do on a day-to-day basis—which is something I couldn’t have conceived of three years ago much less at three. No, I mean generically being a librarian/working in a library is not something the three-year-old John would have ever expressed interest in becoming.

And that’s OK. I would hate to be stuck with the thoughts of my childhood as the be-all end-all of my career (although it would be pretty kick ass to be a T. rex, but still…). Heck, I’d hate to be stuck with my career choice at any point in my life. While I loved working in a bakery in college making amazing cakes and pies, it’s more fun these days to bake for friends and family than if I was doing it all the time.

I like change almost to a fault. This means I need to take care and make effort to finish projects I start. I can’t just take things and flush them down the toilet like poor Ramon in the 1980 monster movie Alligator and have those unfinished projects transform into neglected monsters that bite me in the ass.

It also means that I need to constantly assess what I’m working on to make sure I haven’t transformed it into something unrecognizable. This is particularly true when it comes to Electric Velocipede. Whether it’s the editorials I write or the fiction I’m selecting for the reader, I need to make sure that it’s consistent with the quality and style of what’s come before.

Nowhere is that more evident than our cover images. If you look at the first eight issues, you’ll see the quality of cover that I can make. Once Thom Davidsohn created his first cover for us, it was an easy decision to continue to work with him. With only a few variances, Thom has been our cover artist since issue #9. Now obviously this issue has a cover using work from Carlos Araujo, a talented artist from Brazil and last issue featured work from Jeremy Zerfoss who if you don’t know who he is now, you will when Jeff VanderMeer’s Wonderbook comes out later this year. No matter what, the plan is to have Thom return to covers with the next issue.

We’ve been lucky to have someone with Thom’s talent setting the tone for what the reader will find inside each issue. We’ve been lucky that on the rare occasion that we don’t have a cover for Thom that we’ve found some great art that conveys what it’s like to read an issue of Electric Velocipede: a little whimsical, a little odd, a little scary, and hopefully a lot of fun.

We don’t want to change the formula completely each issue, but we also don’t want to drive the reader into the ground with our unwavering style. Part of the fun is finding new writers and new ideas to make our readers think. To steal a line from myself and the submission guidelines:

Show me something different

That’s what I try to do with the stories I select for each issue. I also hope that they’re similar enough that you know you’re reading Electric Velocipede and not Popular Mechanics. Even these editorials try to be different enough so that I’m not espousing the same ideas every issue.

I think I’ve gone on long enough. You need to head on to our first story this month. Let me know what you think.

John Klima
Waukesha, WI
April 2013